Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing: The Study of an Emergent Majority 3030728803, 9783030728809

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Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing

Edited by Lori G. Beaman Timothy Stacey

Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing

Lori G. Beaman  •  Timothy Stacey Editors

Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing

Editors Lori G. Beaman Department of Classics and Religious Studies University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON, Canada

Timothy Stacey Institute for Area Studies Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-030-72880-9    ISBN 978-3-030-72881-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book reflects on the work of those doing their bit to repair communities, economies and ecosystems. We want to thank them for finding the time and space to let the many authors of this book into their lives for long enough to gain the insights shared here. As editors, it is a privilege to bring so many talented thinkers together in one place, and we would like to give thanks to the authors of each chapter. But it is also important to acknowledge the strain that putting such a volume together takes on our personal lives. Tim would like to thank Fernande “for loving me as if I were the same person when writing that I am when kayaking”. Lori would like to thank Derek “for keeping the rowboat Ringee Dingee in good working order”. Finally, the research, networking and administration that provided the basis for this book were made financially possible by a grant from the University of Kent’s Understanding Unbelief Programme, which was itself funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF grant ID#60624). Further administrative support was provided by the Nonreligion in a Complex Future programme. We want to thank both teams for their support, and Lois Lee in particular for encouraging us as we took these steps and her patience in awaiting the end product.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Timothy Stacey and Lori G. Beaman

Part I Mapping the Issues  17 2 Theoretical and Methodological Background to Understandings of (Non)religion 19 Peter Beyer 3 How New Is the Study of Nonreligion? Theological Contributions to the Emergent Reflection on Nonreligion in Social Sciences 29 Solange Lefebvre

Part II Now What?  41 4 Going, Going, Gone? Canadian Churches and the Rise of Non-religion 43 Brian Clarke

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5 The Mobilization of Religious and Nonreligious Imaginaries in Argentine Sexual Politics 59 Hugo H. Rabbia and Juan Marco Vaggione

Part III Positive Content  75 6 Cultural Creatives: Embodiment of a Transmodern Vision 77 Julia Itel 7 Reweaving Spheres: Towards an Ultimate Meaning of Practice 89 Timothy Stacey 8 Not Radical, Not Preaching, but Reaching Out to Others: Nonreligious Expressions of Identity and Relationality Through Food101 Anna Sofia Salonen

Part IV Living Well Together in a New Diversity 115 9 “World Repairing” and ‘Non religious’ in Law: Antithetical Notions or New Mindsets?117 Dia Dabby 10 Collaboration Across Difference: New Diversities and the Challenges of Our Times127 Lori G. Beaman 11 Afterword: Towards an Understanding of Being Human141 Douglas Ezzy

Index151

Notes on Contributors

Lori  G.  Beaman, PhD, FRSC  is Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change, Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Principal Investigator of the Nonreligion in a Complex Future Project. Publications include Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity (2017, Italian translation Eguaglianza profunda in un’era di diversità religiosa, Ariele, 2018) and “Living Well Together in a (non)Religious Future: Contributions from the Sociology of Religion,” Sociology of Religion, 78(1), 9–32. She received the 2017 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Impact Award in the Insight Category and holds an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. Peter Beyer  is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His major areas include religion and globalization, sociological theory of religion, religion and migration, and religion in contemporary Canada. His publications include Religion and Globalization (1994), Religions in Global Society (2006), Religion in the Context of Globalization (2013), and Growing Up Canadian: Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists (with R.  Ramji, 2013). His research is on the construction of religious and nonreligious identity in Canada and developing theory on religious transformation in contemporary global society. Brian Clarke  teaches at the Toronto School of Theology and Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto. He is the co-author with Stuart Macdonald of Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945. ix

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Dia  Dabby is a regular professor at the Département des sciences juridiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), where she teaches and conducts research in the field of public law. Her scholarship has focused on law, religion and institutions from a Canadian and comparative constitutional context. Dia’s work has been published in Supreme Court Law Review, Dalhousie Law Journal, Studies in Religion, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Religion & Human Rights as well as in Constitutions and Religion (2020), Modération ou extrémisme? Regards critiques sur la loi 21 (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2020), Research Handbook on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Law and Religion (2019), Au croisement des univers juridiques et religieux—Le meilleur intérêt de l’enfant/The Best Interests of the Child: Legal and Religious Perspectives (Éditions Yvon Blais, 2019) and Globalized Religion and Sexuality (2014). Douglas  Ezzy, PhD is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tasmania, Australia. His research is driven by a fascination with how people make meaningful lives and respectful relationships. He is lead investigator of the Australian Research Council Discovery project “Religious freedom, LGBT+ employees, and the right to discriminate” and another ARC project on “Religious Diversity in Australia”. He is a co-investigator on the Canadian “Nonreligion in a Complex Future” project lead by Professor Lori Beaman. His books include LGBT Christians (2017, with Bronwyn Fielder), Reinventing Church (2016, with Helen and James Collins), Sex, Death and Witchcraft (2014), Teenage Witches (2007, with Helen Berger), and Qualitative Analysis (2002). Julia  Itel  holds an MA (2018) in Religious Studies from University of Montreal and is a PhD candidate in sociology at Paris Nanterre University. In her master’s thesis, she sought to understand the role of non-religious spirituality in adopting ethical and ecologically sustainable values and behaviors, among an emerging social tendency: cultural creatives. Her master’s thesis is being published in France by Yves Michel (Spiritualité et société durable. L’engagement éthique des créatifs culturels, 2019). In her doctoral research, Julia Itel is interested in the beliefs, ideologies and more broadly in the social imaginary that surrounds discourses on the socio-­ ecological (or eco-anthropological) transition. She seeks, more specifically, to theorize the emergence of a transmodernity. Solange Lefebvre  who has studied in music, theology and social anthropology is Full Professor at the Institute of Religious Studies, University of

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Montreal. She holds the Research Chair in Management of Cultural and Religious Diversity and has been named director of a new research interdisciplinary center on religions and spiritualties at the University of Montreal. Her areas of interest include religion in the public sphere, Catholicism, laïcité and secularisation, youth and generations. As someone regularly consulted by governments, the media, as well as public and private organizations, her most recent research projects include Pluralism and chaplaincies in the provincial correctional facilities in Québec, and Radicalizations leading to violence and the media. Recent publications: Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion 9: The Changing Faces of Catholicism (2018); Public Commissions on Diversity (2017); Catholicisme et cultures. Regards croisés Québec-France [Catholicism and Cultures. Crossed views on Québec-France] (Presses de l’Université Laval et Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015). Hugo  H.  Rabbia  holds PhD in Latin America Social Studies and is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), at the Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIPsi), Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. He is also Professor of Political Psychology at Universidad Católica de Córdoba. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-­0001-­9241-­5155. Anna  Sofia  Salonen  is a theologian and sociologist of religion, with a broad interest in nonreligion, food consumption, morality, everyday life and social inequality. She works as an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland. Her project (Im)moderation in everyday food consumption (2018–2021) explores the content and construction of ethical lives of ordinary people by asking what they consider to be moderate with regard to food consumption and by analyzing how they construct these views. Timothy  Stacey  is Lecturer in Area Studies at Leiden University. He holds an MA in Philosophical Theology from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in the Sociology of Religion from the Faiths and Civil Society unit, Goldsmiths, University of London. Tim critically explores religious, emotional and practice-based means of triggering transformation towards political, economic and ecological solidarity. He is the author of Myth and Solidarity in the Modern World (2018) and Saving Liberalism From Itself (2022). And he is the co-founder of AltVisions.org.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Juan Marco Vaggione  is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) and Professor of Sociology at the National University of Córdoba. He is the Director of the Sexual and Reproductive Rights Program at the same university. He is also a co-­ investigator on the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project ­(nonreligionproject.ca).

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5

Anglican Church of Canada membership 1951–2017 Comparison of denominational statistics to census affiliates No religious affiliation No religious affiliation by age No religious affiliation by sex

45 47 49 51 52

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Timothy Stacey and Lori G. Beaman

Abstract  In this opening chapter, we outline the dual contribution of this book, designed simultaneously to speak to scholars of nonreligion and academics, policy makers and activists interested in how to garner interest in what we, following others, call world repairing work: the work of bringing people together across differences and of making the world liveable for human and other-than-human beings. The last two decades have seen a groundswell of research into nonreligion. But this has been focused almost exclusively on the “non” part of nonreligion. Instead, our contribution is to focus on the positive content of nonreligious imaginaries as they are lived out in both extraordinary and everyday practices of world repairing. We argue that this work is vital for those seeking to foster world repairing work because it tells us something about the way the world is already imagined by those on the frontline and, in so doing, speaks to the distance

T. Stacey (*) Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands L. G. Beaman Department of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_1

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and direction of ideational travel that is required for more widespread social and political transformation. Keywords  Religion • Nonreligion • Imaginaries • World repairing It often seems that we are still in the throes of a battle for the human “soul”. One side assures us that without religion there is no morality. The other side holds religion responsible for the exploitation of people and planet that has characterised recorded history. Not only do such pronouncements mischaracterise the diverse, pragmatic and creative ways that humans imagine and interact with the world around them, but they foreclose the modest work of starting where people are at, and understanding from their perspectives what motivates them to find ways of living well with one another and with other-than-human beings. The role of this book is to shine a light on nonreligious imaginaries as they inspire world-­ repairing work. The reason for this is not because we consider either religion or nonreligion more valid but because nonreligious identities are rapidly rising in many parts of the world and we want to know more about those iterations that will serve to promote cooperation and solidarity. There has been a flourishing of research into nonreligion over the last ten years. Lois Lee’s landmark Recognizing the Non-religious (Lee, 2015) brings much of this research together. Lee notes a distinct lack of research into what nonreligious people actually believe in. The need for research in this area was recognised in the development of her Understanding Unbelief programme (John Templeton Foundation), as well as more recently in Lori Beaman’s Nonreligion in a Complex Future programme (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). Both of these programmes of research respond to the fact that quantitative research in particular is almost exclusively focused on the ‘non’ part of nonreligion and very little attention is paid to its substantive content (Cragun, 2019; Smith & Cragun, 2019). This is troubling because, with nonreligion on the rise across the Western world, it is important to gain a better understanding of what this group believes in, gains a sense of belonging from and is willing to fight for. For many, not being religious may not be a very important part of their identity. The focus on what nonreligion is not is partly sustained through research that focuses on beliefs held by people who self-describe as nonreligious. Although such research offers an important window into this emerging group, it can lead to too-hasty conclusions and generalisations

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about who the nonreligious are. And context is everything as the implications of identifying as nonreligious vary. By way of an alternative, a number of authors in this volume choose in different ways to study political, social or ecological practices as potentially informative about nonreligious imaginaries. While sometimes these practices involve explicitly rejecting or reforming religion (e.g. the campaigners for gender and sexuality rights explored by Rabbia and Vaggione), in other cases neither religion nor nonreligion is mentioned. For the authors highlighting these cases, we see varied, subtle attempts to simultaneously identify participants according to the negative identifiers they are trying to get beyond (nonreligion, secularity), while nonetheless focusing on the causes and practices to which they are committed, which may have little to do with their nonreligious identity. Itel chooses to include only people who identify as ‘not religious but spiritual’ while focusing broadly on their feelings about the economic and ecological world as a whole. Although Salonen and Stacey work with participants who have identified themselves as being nonreligious and ‘for whom religion is of no more than a secondary concern’, respectively, they deliberately steer observations away from overtly religious or nonreligious elements. Salonen is not interested in people’s nonreligiosity as such but in the role that food plays in their lives. Similarly, Stacey is interested in how people locate meaning in the practice of solidarity. And Beaman does not ask for people’s religious or nonreligious identity at all but rather explores sea turtle conservation initiatives as a prism through which to understand religion and nonreligion. The focus on what nonreligion is not may also stem partly from a difficulty of finding the right words for labelling the content we are trying to study. Some scholars have tried to ‘format’ (Arsheim & Hovdkinn, 2020) this content, bringing it into the fold alongside religion. Taves (2018), for example, has proffered the term ‘worldviews’ as a broader subset into which both religion and nonreligion can fit. This work is important in fields such as migration, marriage and labour in which people have immediate needs to claim rights on the basis of their beliefs (Beaman et  al., 2018). On the other hand, there is a risk that in the name of recognition, this process distorts nonreligious identity, making it look like religion (Asad, 2003; Scott, 1999). The use of terms like ‘worldviews’ potentially conjures a robust, systemic or dogmatic way of thinking that neglects the complexity of the ways that many nonreligious people engage with the world—and this just at a time when research on religion has finally made the shift from dogma to identity (Stacey, 2020). Drawing on the work of

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Benedict Anderson and Charles Taylor, we prefer the term imaginaries. Taylor uses the term to mean ‘the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, [which] … is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories and legends’ (Taylor, 2007, p.  23). Anderson used the notion of imagined communities to understand nationalism, which captures the possible political implications of some of the ways in which the nonreligious people understand what matters to them. We add materials and practices to Taylor’s ideational list. Over the last 20  years, a pool of researchers have sought to ‘re-materialize scholarly conceptualizations of religion by approaching it as irreducibly corporeal and physical’ (Meyer, 2019, p. 620). Theirs has been an arduous task of deconstructing a centuries-old Protestant bias that prioritises beliefs and ideas at the expense of materials, rituals and practices. As we turn to study nonreligious people, it is crucial that this prioritisation be challenged. The power of the term imaginary, in our view, is in its ability to traverse distinctions between religious and nonreligious ways of understanding the world while avoiding thinking of either as unified systems. Focusing on imaginaries allows for a scholarly reappraisal of the power of certain stories, relations, rituals and practices in giving shape to nonreligious lives. In turn, we hope scholarly work can make a small contribution to the public reclaiming of ways of engaging with the world. There is a compulsion to discover the ways that people are ‘good without god’ which of course reifies the assumption that there is somehow a correlation between religion and goodness. This is not our project. Rather, we seek to explore how people engage with the world around them, including the stories they tell, the people they admire and socialise with and the projects they undertake.

The Contribution of Studies of World Repairing to the Study of Both Religion and Nonreligion In paying attention to these aspects, we build on a wealth of recent research that seeks to relocate the study of belief away from dogma and towards practice and everyday lived nonreligion. We develop this tradition by moving beyond lifecycle rituals to world-repairing behaviours. In other words, rather than exploring how and why people celebrate birth, marriage and death, we explore how and why people engage in particular activities that seek to put the world right. We argue that such activities reveal a great deal

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about what matters to people and is an embodied enactment of both their own identities and the world they imagine. Drawing on the work of Woodhead (2016) and Beaman (2017b), we are particularly focused on ‘world-repairing’ work. We use the term ‘world repairing’ to indicate a response to a perceived sense of brokenness in the social and physical world. Amongst the cultural creatives involved in Itel’s research, it is ‘the system’ that is broken. For the community organisers with whom Stacey spends time, it is communities that are broken. They imagine a past in which communities were strong and tightly knit, a present in which they are frayed and a future in which they are rewoven. For the sea turtle rescuers that inspire Beaman’s research, it is the physical world that is broken. They see themselves as being at the service of nature and helping to mitigate damage caused by humans. Research is emerging that links nonreligion and secularity to prosocial behaviours and actions (Chandler, 2008; Frost & Edgell, 2018; Galen, 2017; Thiessen & Wilkins-Laflamme, 2017; Zuckerman, 2009). However, largely due to a perceived uphill battle to demonstrate the moral legitimacy and public virtue of the nonreligious in North America, this research has largely focused on demonstrating that nonreligious people do good works, rather than asking what role their imaginaries play in shaping this work. Some researchers, particularly in quantitative sociology and experimental psychology, warn against conflating belief and behaviour, lest we falsely attribute activities to particular imaginaries that in fact have more to do with social pressure (Galen, 2017). But equally we might warn against artificially distending belief and behaviour, as though the one does not inform the other. It is important, in the quest for hard scientific evidence, not to treat the imagination as if it were merely epiphenomenal—an inconsequential projection of material interests. As Alexander (2005), Laidlaw (2014) and many others have stressed, to renounce the role of ideas in history is as unscientific as giving them absolute autonomy. Between these poles of materialism and idealism, we prefer a pragmatic approach that eschews the search for scientific certainty in favour of the meanings that arise when we pay detailed attention to practice (Wills & Lake, 2020).

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The Contribution of the Study of Nonreligion to Understanding World-Repairing Work Taking imaginaries seriously is still relatively niche in social scientific research. Despite what has been described as a ‘cultural turn’ in social movement theory (Giugni, 1998; Hart, 1996; Polletta, 2008), structural approaches have remained dominant. Social science is still widely understood as a ‘science of unfreedom’ (Bauman, 2010). Studying imaginaries is treated as a ‘soft’ approach, even as research is increasingly suggesting that values are crucial in shaping people’s political commitments (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). This marginalisation has allowed some researchers to make paradoxical and dangerous claims that culture can never replace biology as a source of identity and that therefore concepts such as whiteness and maleness must be re-legitimised as sources of political identity (Kaufmann, 2019; Peterson, 2018). In part on account of its subject matter, the sociological and anthropological study of religion has always carried a strong constituency of researchers who take imaginaries seriously. As a result, scholars in the study of religion are now uniquely placed to offer two crucial contributions to what we are calling world-repairing work. First, scholars and activists often attribute blame to religion generally, Abrahamic faith in particular and Christianity most of all in the rise of exploitative attitudes towards the other-than-human beings and other humans. Scholars with a background in the study of religion are well placed to disentangle these threads and, most importantly, surface the role that rejecting or reforming religious beliefs, organisations or hierarchies plays in shaping the activist imaginary. Second, these same scholars have an array of research techniques and tools ready to hand for interpreting the imaginaries of the emergent nonreligious majority. Recognising that neither religious nor nonreligious are confined to meditation and lifecycle rituals, researchers of nonreligion can, as Salonen puts it in her chapter, ‘apply creative approaches and unconventional new perspectives’ to practices in which ‘meaning, identity and community are frequently reflected’. By mapping out the imaginary processes at work amongst those engaging in world-repairing activities, we hope that we can begin to speak to the distance and direction of travel required for more widespread political and social transformation. What we hope we begin to capture in this volume is the value in studying everyday engagement as a source of better understanding the phenomenon of nonreligion. By demonstrating the crucial role that

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world-repairing practices play in nonreligious people’s imaginaries, we are able to place meaning-making and identity centre stage. In so doing, we hope to provide new perspectives to researchers and practitioners who might have otherwise ignored the (non)religious imaginary of their target group. In the first section of the book, Mapping the Issues, we delve more deeply into the contours of nonreligion and in particular theoretical and methodological considerations. Three key debates have emerged in the context of this discussion: first, what exactly do we mean by ‘nonreligion’ and what are the implications of choosing one definitional path over another? Second, what are the consequences of religion being the primary referent in discussions of nonreligion? And third, is the phenomenon of nonreligion anything new? In his chapter, Peter Beyer recommends getting beyond what religion is not and instead focusing on what it is: what form it takes socially and how it is expressed in individual thoughts and behaviours. He stresses that this means not limiting research to the study of atheism or humanism. Instead, he explains that we must explore those aspects of nonreligious belief and behaviour that do for the nonreligious similar things to what religion does for religious people. Beyer’s chapter raises one of the most persistent challenges of the study of nonreligion, namely, the very terminology itself which is always in relation to religion and always negative. It was that context that in fact inspired this book. We shared a commitment to moving towards describing the positive content of nonreligion, not only at an individual level (i.e. what do people who self-describe as nonreligious believe and practice) but at the community and societal level as well. Beyer also picks up on the transitional nature of this project: we are in a moment of significant social change in a number of societies that have previously been characterised by a dominance of one version of Christianity or another. To be sure, the residue of that will endure, and Christianity will persist, but what happens when it is simply one of many choices, one of which is to be ‘nonreligious’? As scholars we are attempting to describe relatively new territory. Or is it? Solange Lefebve picks up this question in her chapter where she discusses the period of 1965–1993 in which there was an intense dialogue in the Catholic Church about unbelief. The Courtyard of the Gentiles is well known. What is less known and what Lefebvre discusses in detail is a discussion between believers and nonbelievers that took place primarily in

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Quebec and which was captured in the journal Nouveau Dialogue. Although the discussion was intended primarily to address the growing unease about the increase in nones within the Catholic Church, it had resonances outside of that context as well. And, it must not be forgotten that the vast majority of Quebecers identified as Catholic, at least on surveys, during that time (and in fact still do, although as Clarke points out in his chapter, this is more complicated than it at first appears). Lefebvre maps a pivotal moment in the conversation between religious and nonreligious people that is key to the core theme of this book—after several months of meeting, they came to the conclusion that a more interesting conversation would be to explore their shared areas of interest around social engagement and to act rather than talk on common projects with a social justice theme. This profound shift is precisely what to us is of most interest in the study of nonreligion: how do people who are different not only get along but also collaborate on world repairing work? We are not the first to ask this question, with other researchers concluding that interaction and doing things together (Weisse, 2011) are important facilitators of living well together. Lefebvre herself recommends moving beyond the tendency to distinguish between religious and nonreligious, belief and unbelief, suggesting that we instead turn our gaze to understanding what people, religious or not, most deeply believe in. As debates about definitional and methodological challenges persist, the fact of the matter is that a significant number of people have left organised religion, mostly Christianity, in many Western countries. The impact of this is part of what scholars of nonreligion are studying. The second section of the book, Now What?, considers what is being left behind—not as a lament about the decline of organised Christianity but as a recognition that there are social impacts and consequences to the social change being experienced in all the settings in which nonreligious imaginaries are on the rise. How is the world being reconstructed and reframed in the wake of these changes? We explore the implications of this new absence for the key political, social and cultural questions framing the new study of nonreligion. While focusing on the Americas and on Christianity, authors question whether nonreligion conceptually implies non-Christianity and highlights distinctions between the global north and south and between post-Protestantism and post-Catholicism. Drawing on quantitative measures of religion and nonreligion in Canada, in Chap. 4, Brian Clarke explains that by the emergent majority

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we are talking about those who check ‘none’ when asked to name their religious affiliation in national census data and other surveys. He also points out that the figures we have are likely lagging indicators, meaning that the number of people who have left religion, and here we are talking almost exclusively about Christianity, is larger than what is captured by census data. He raises a concern about the impact of declining participation in institutional religious life related to charitable giving and volunteering. It remains to be seen how this will play out for civil society. Chapter 5 by Hugo H. Rabbia and Juan Marco Vaggione challenges the binary myths that shape public discourse in Argentina, those of a necessarily Catholic Argentina and, paradoxically, a secular Argentina. They trace the fascinating collaboration of both Catholic (Catholics for Choice) and nonreligious (The Collective Apostasy Campaign) activists in the fight for reproductive and abortion rights. In both cases, activists challenge the right of the Church to speak for them, and both involve an entanglement with religion that makes binary and essentialising conclusions impossible. With a core focus on justice and world-repairing action, the answer to ‘now what’ in this context would seem to be that social justice and substantive equality become more possible. But this is not because in some simple way, Christianity is being left behind. Rather, it is because for some reason a large group of people are seeing gender and sexuality rights as so crucial to their understanding of who they are and where they ought to be as a community that they are willing to disobey or disaffiliate from the church in order to stand up for those rights. The third section, Positive Content, answers the call for research into nonreligious beliefs and behaviours. It draws the theoretical, methodological and socio-political questions presented in previous sections into specific case studies of nonreligious people involved in world-repairing work. It seeks to illuminate the ethical imaginaries of nonreligious people as they live out their ordinary lives, the political commitments and their ideals of a more solidary, equal and sustainable future. Julia Itel opens with an ambitious attempt to flesh out nonreligious spirituality in relation to the contemporary economic and ecological landscape. The number of people identifying as ‘spiritual but not religious’ is growing across the Western world. Whereas a long tradition of research has suggested that the new spirituality may be individualised, depoliticised and self-interested (Bellah et  al., 2007; Barman, 2008), Itel shows that this group displays a shared resistance to excesses associated with capitalism such as consumerism, competitiveness, individualism, technology and

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environmental catastrophe. Itel suggests that her interlocutors are developing a ‘politics of small steps’ in which they slowly reform their behaviour with the ultimate aim of reforming society as a whole. In Chap. 7, Timothy Stacey explores how community organisers are developing an ‘ultimate meaning of practice’ in their attempt to stand up to capitalism in Vancouver, Canada. Stacey’s analysis suggests that reifying nonreligious identity as a set of beliefs neglects the important place of practice. And yet, he argues, to think these practices are not making metaphysical claims is equally misleading. By emphasising an ultimate meaning of practice, claims Stacey, these community organisers are ‘laying the foundations for a revised vision of modernity with a thick idea of public virtue at its core’. The lens of values is further taken up by Anna Salonen in her chapter. Salonen explores people’s nonreligious identity through their everyday food consumption practices. She focuses on how people refrain from rigid identity categories, preferring to explain their values through their behaviours. She reveals a tension between people’s commitment to being non-­ judgemental and their desire to influence others’ food habits. Food also serves as a crucial way of building connections, and food-sharing is regarded as ‘a fundamental human value’. In this way, Salonen reveals how attention to the everyday can offer a window into the worlds people are trying to make a reality. For us the most striking feature of all three chapters is that in each case the search for meaning is articulated through practice. Itel notices convergence around the practice of ‘dropping out’ from modern, capitalist society, and in the subsequent search for a life lived in harmony with nature. Stacey’s interlocutors find ultimate meaning in treating every human interaction is valuable in itself. Salonen’s participants create meaning by reaching out to people through food. We conjecture that practice may well be a crucial characteristic of nonreligious meaning-making in Western settings. One way to make sense of this would be that the continuing domination of a religious/secular, ideational/material binary in Western settings may mean that those who opt out of religion do so partly because they do not derive meaning from metaphysical questions. This possibility seems supported amongst Stacey’s interlocutors, who seem to use words like ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ as a proxy for talking about what is missing from capitalist logics, even as their

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answers are not found in logics at all but in practice. Practice must take centre stage in studies of nonreligion. It is moreover important to stress that none of these practices are obvious cognates to religious lifecycle rituals. Thus if, as Beyer’s suggests in his chapter, to study nonreligion means ‘to look at what nonreligious people believe and practice that is similar to what religion does for religious people’, as researchers we must be sure to avoid searching for nonreligion in obvious places, instead focusing on what might be called lived nonreligion. Our emphasis on practice, however, should not be taken to mean that nonreligious imaginaries are void of ideational elements. Itel goes as far as to suggest that spirituality is crucial in understanding the renewed sense of connection her participants feel with nature and their dropping out from mainstream society. Stacey suggests that even if ultimate meaning is found in practice, still this practice makes a claim on what humans are and how they should be. It is a performative realisation of an imaginary in which each human being and each interaction is an end in itself without reference to an ultimate goal. Salonen’s participants treat reaching out to others through food as a ‘fundamental human value’. Even as we focus on nonreligion, we must situate it in simultaneous developments that constitute what Beaman (2017a) calls the ‘new diversity’, including ‘a renewed presence of religion, or at the very least a more vocal religious presence of religion, coupled with an increase in non-­ religion’ (ibid., p.  200). In the final section of the book, Living Well Together in a New Diversity, we seek to do just this. We ask how to deal with the new diversity presented by the emergent nonreligious majority in policy and practice. Focusing on the most pressing institutional structure for addressing current crises (law), and future possibilities of living well together, the section seeks to offer a critical but optimistic discussion of the ontological changes required in the public sphere. In Chap. 9, Dabby elaborates on the vocabulary and grammar of nonreligious and ‘world-repairing’ claims before the courts in the UK, Canada and the US. In so doing, she is able to show how nonreligious identity is publicly expressed and (re)shaped through law’s lens. She focuses on how nonreligious identities intertwine with time and in terms of visibility, stressing that this indicates distinctive nonreligious citizenship-building capacities rooted in ‘otherworldly, albeit not religious, commitments’. Dabby’s chapter draws to our attention the unique dimensions of

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nonreligion that can best be understood through an examination of the legal field. In Chap. 10, Beaman invites us to suspend binaries between religion and nonreligion, focusing instead on thinking critically about ‘how religion and nonreligion are being produced and constructed in everyday life, within groups and by social institutions’. By way of a case study, Beaman offers the example of sea turtle conservation. She explains how, even when explicitly Christian discourse is absent from their discussions, the participants in her research complexly reproduce and challenge notions of stewardship, dominance and hierarchies. Beaman’s work is crucial in that, like a range of new materialist philosophers before her (Latour, 2018; Meyer, 2019; Morton, 2017), she emphasises that when exploring imaginaries, we must be attentive to not only the way that humans shape the nonhuman world but also how it shapes them back. Perhaps most controversially, she closes with the claim that ‘the new diversity, and in particular the rise of nonreligion, has opened space for an imaginary of equality in which the human relationship with nonhuman animals and the world around us is in the process of being renegotiated’. It is precisely these kinds of claims that Ezzy takes issue with in his reflections in the Afterword. For Ezzy, if we are to fairly explore the relationship between the rise of nonreligion and approaches to the world, then alongside world-repairing work, we must also seek to understand ‘the failings, and destructive practices of nonreligious people that are also part of their imaginaries, rituals, and everyday practices’. Here we must return to our two aims. In our aim to explore those aspects of nonreligious belief and behaviour that do for the nonreligious similar things to what religion does for religious people, it is perhaps inevitable that we would land on laudable practices. This focus is further demanded by our second aim to demonstrate how the study of nonreligion can contribute to understandings of how to facilitate world-repairing work. Yet Ezzy is right to point out that our focus on these elements leaves us with only one side of the picture. It is equally important, for example, to explore how nonreligious imaginaries might block sustainable practices. For example, if philosopher Timothy Morton (2017) sis right that rediscovering elements of animism will be crucial to transforming behaviour in relation to the nonhuman world, it would be important to explore the ways in which nonreligious ontologies stand in the way of this transition. Or, if we are to believe Stacey that people can find something equivalent

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to ultimate meaning in anti-capitalist practice, we need also to recognise that others may eschew meaning altogether or else may seal off their ethical identity from their practice, choosing to see their work, however damaging it is to the world, as ‘just a job’ that does not bear on their value as a human being. Perhaps more controversially still, it may well be the case that some people find something equivalent to ultimate meaning in practices of domination over other humans and the nonhuman world. We neither deny nor seek to hide this equally plausible take on nonreligious imaginaries. Rather, we would simply stress that exploring them is the work of another volume.

References Alexander, J. C. (2005). The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford University Press. Arsheim, H., & Hovdkinn, E. (2020). Formatting Nonreligion in Late Modern Societies. Springer. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford Univ. Press. Barman, J. (2008). Cascadia Once Upon A Time. In D. Todd (Ed.), In Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia. Ronsdale Press. Bauman, Z. (2010). Towards a Critical Sociology (Routledge Revivals): An Essay on Commonsense and Imagination. Routledge. Beaman, L.  G. (2017a). Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?dir ect=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1529013 Beaman, L.  G. (2017b). Living Well Together in a (Non)Religious Future: Contributions from the Sociology of Religion. Sociology of Religion, 78(1), 9–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srw054 Beaman, L. G., Steele, C., & Pringnitz, K. (2018). The Inclusion of Nonreligion in Religion and Human Rights. Social Compass, 65(1), 43–61. https://doi. org/10.1177/0037768617745480 Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (2007). Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1st ed., With a New Preface ed.). University of California Press. Chandler, S. (2008). The Social Ethic of Religiously Unaffiliated Spirituality. Religion Compass, 2(2), 240–256. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-­8171.2007.00059.x Cragun, R.  T. (2019). Questions You Should Never Ask an Atheist: Towards Better Measures of Nonreligion and Secularity. Secularism and Nonreligion, 8(0), 6. https://doi.org/10.5334/snr.122

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Frost, J., & Edgell, P. (2018). Rescuing Nones From the Reference Category: Civic Engagement Among the Nonreligious in America. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 47(2), 417–438. https://doi. org/10.1177/0899764017746251 Galen, L. (2017). Secular Prosociality and Well-Being. In P.  Zuckerman & J. R. Shook (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Secularism. Giugni, M. G. (1998). Structure and Culture in Social Movement Theory’. Edited by J. Craig Jenkins, Bert Klandermans, Hank Johnston, Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, Mayer N. Zald, Aldon D. Morris, and Carol McClurg Mueller. Sociological Forum, 13(2), 365–375. Hart, S. (1996). The Cultural Dimension of Social Movements: A Theoretical Reassessment and Literature Review. Sociology of Religion, 57(1), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.2307/3712006 Kaufmann, E. (2019). Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. Penguin. Laidlaw, J. (2014). The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (1st ed.). Polity. Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford University Press. Meyer, B. (2019). “Material Approaches to Religion” Meet “New Materialism”: Resonances and Dissonances. Material Religion, 15(5), 620–621. https://doi. org/10.1080/17432200.2019.1666581 Morton, T. (2017). Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London. Verso. Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press. Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Random House. Polletta, F. (2008). Culture and Movements. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 619(1), 78–96. https://doi. org/10.1177/0002716208320042 Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. Smith, J. M., & Cragun, R. T. (2019). Mapping Religion’s Other: A Review of the Study of Nonreligion and Secularity. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 58(2), 319–335. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12597 Stacey, T. (2020). Why “Formatting” Nonreligion Might Be a Bad Idea: From Public Recognition to Political Reform. In H. Arsheim & E. Hovdkinn (Eds.), Formatting Nonreligion in Late Modern Societies. Springer. Taves, A. (2018). What Is Nonreligion? On the Virtues of a Meaning Systems Framework for Studying Nonreligious and Religious Worldviews in the Context of Everyday Life. Secularism and Nonreligion, 7(1), 9. https://doi. org/10.5334/snr.104

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Taylor, C. (2007). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke Univ. Press. Thiessen, J., & Wilkins-Laflamme, S. (2017). Becoming a Religious None: Irreligious Socialization and Disaffiliation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 56(1), 64–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12319 Weisse, W. (2011). Reflections on the REDCo Project. British Journal of Religious Education, 33(2), 111–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141620 0.2011.543589 Wills, J., & Lake, R. (2020). Introduction: The Power of Pragmatism. In J. Wills & R. Lake (Eds.), In The Power of Pragmatism. Manchester University Press. Woodhead, L. (2016). Is No Religion the New Religion? Zuckerman, P. (2009). Atheism, Secularity, and Well-Being: How the Findings of Social Science Counter Negative Stereotypes and Assumptions. Sociology Compass, 3(6), 949–971. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17519020.2009.00247.x

PART I

Mapping the Issues

CHAPTER 2

Theoretical and Methodological Background to Understandings of (Non)religion Peter Beyer

Abstract  The importance of studying nonreligion is growing with the increase of people in many countries who do not identify as religious or as having a religion. Conceptualising nonreligion, however, is inherently difficult because the phenomenon is primarily negative: it is not religion. Positive conceptions therefore usually insist that nonreligion bear some relation to religion. This chapter suggests the use of Weber’s idea of systems of life regulation as a way forward. It identifies various areas of social life where religious systems of life regulation operate and where therefore nonreligious life regulation might be found, operationalized, and studied. These include sexual, food, and life passage regulation, among others. Illustrations of nonreligious approaches to these areas are provided to show how such regulation might work without being another form of or substitute for religion, without using religious content or being structured through familiar religious determinations such as sacredness, transcendence, or super-empirical actors.

P. Beyer (*) University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_2

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Keywords  Religion/nonreligion relation • Nonreligion • Research methods • Systems of life regulation (sex, food, life passages) The topic of nonreligion is a recent one in sociology, with significant and sustained research attention dating only from about the beginning of the 2010s (Lee, 2015; Quack et  al., 2020; Voas, 2009; Woodhead, 2016; Zuckerman, 2010; Zuckerman et al., 2016). The reasons for this development are a matter of speculation, of course, all the more so as the questions of what nonreligion is and why it is important are almost as elusive. One development that is undoubtedly involved is the growth in recent decades of the percentage of populations in many Western countries that declare themselves to be without religion on surveys and censuses (Voas & Chaves, 2016; Pollack & Rosta, 2017; Singleton, 2015; Clarke in this volume). This decline in religious identification is accompanied by continued decline in the other traditional measures of religiosity such as religious belief and religious practice. In some countries and regions, the percentage of these ‘nones’ has become the majority; in others it now represents a quarter or more of the population after having previously been relatively small. Even in the United States, that former ‘exception’ to the rule of this kind of religious decline, the number has increased to around a quarter of the population (Pew Research Center, 2019, p. 3). Various other factors are also likely at play, including perhaps (a) the increase in negative assessment of religion in these same countries in light of the prominence of religiously inspired violence, (b) religious opposition to moral liberalization—for example, regarding homosexuality and other sexual issues or with respect to euthanasia—as the same populations gradually drift more and more towards such liberalization, and (c) religious activism in politics that is seen by many as inappropriate or at least concerning. This combination of increased moving away from religion and increased controversy concerning religion indicates that both push and pull factors may be involved, but above all it suggests that the importance of nonreligion is not so much—or not just—in the phenomenon itself or even in the static relation between religion and nonreligion, however conceptualized, but rather in the dynamic relation between them, the fact that there is an increasing transition happening out of an at one time quite dominant social identity category and into some other condition which we are, for lack of a better term, calling by that which it is not: nonreligion. It is the possible consequence of this transition that renders the question of

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nonreligion important, even before we can settle on a positive nomenclature for what we may be transitioning to. A further indication of the importance of this dynamic transitional relation is that, already dating from the 1990s (and even before in some respects), sociology has been very interested in the possible rise and even rise to dominance of ‘sort of religious’ or ‘other than traditionally religious’ categories, that is, categories which get most of their meaning from their relation to religion. These have also been growing among the same populations, categories like spiritual (more than religious), culturally religious, marginally religious, religiously indifferent, fuzzy religious, and the like. It has also, in terms of the controversies, been interested in ‘problematic’ religion, whether in the form of ‘fundamentalisms’, ‘cults’, or even any religion that might appear (too) ‘strong’. In this light, therefore, what nonreligion positively might be, and its importance inform one another. Because of the dynamic relation, which is to say the transitional character of religion to nonreligion, the thus far more convincing suggestions for conceptualising nonreligion have taken a path which insists that nonreligion must bear some significant relation to religion, not just in what it is not, but also in what it is. Lee and Quack (Lee, 2012; Quack, 2014), for instance, have insisted that, even though the concept of nonreligion could be cast very broadly, in order for it to have any consequential meaning at all, we should limit our research to those manifestations and phenomena that have an evident, and even explicit, relation to religion, but are not religion. It is the not-religious-­ anymore zone more or less close to religion that becomes the object of inquiry. Hence, Lee speaks of the substantive secular and Quack of nonreligion that refers to religion. Both insist that potential nonreligion which goes beyond this penumbral zone loses contour and meaning because it is anything that is not religion, not nonreligion, represented in extremely broad concepts like identity, worldview, or the secular. The argument is that, if we have recourse to such broad concepts, there is really no point in speaking about nonreligion because everything except religion will count as nonreligion, and therefore this concept can have no determinate contour other than what it is not. The prescription to limit nonreligion to those manifestations that bear a relation to religion, if we accept it, requires that we decide what religion is. Since this has never been a straightforward matter in the study of religion, it is important that any concept of nonreligion addresses it directly. There is, however, no single clear strategy to follow in this regard. There

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are only a number of possible strategies, including restricting religion to the (so-called) religions or having count as religion only those things that its carriers consider to be religion. Another defensible position is to use one of the standard definitional criteria, such as sacredness or transcendence, treating as nonreligion anything that resembles religion or has a relation to religion, but does not exhibit these criteria. Although I do not have the space here to defend the position, I would suggest that nonreligion can also be that which bears a relation to religion, but does not include the reality or social involvement of, as Tylor put it, spiritual beings (Sharpe, 1986, p. 56), more precisely such postulated agencies—whether personal or not—that interact with humans but are not centred in biological organisms. In all these cases, or others that one might think of, nonreligion would be anything that falls outside these delimiters but still bears a relation to religion, whether explicit or not. From this point, however, a further step is required in order to be able to identify the positive content of nonreligion. The absence of substantive criteria like being outside the religions, not being identified as religion, not containing sacredness or transcendence, or not involving extra-­ biological agencies still only delimits nonreligion by what it is not. To be able to say what nonreligion is, one can resort to that other common definitional strategy with respect to religion, namely, function or what religion (supposedly) does in society. Thus, nonreligion would be social phenomena that for its carriers do what religion does (for religious people), but without the religion characteristics. This could include a wide variety of things, since religion evidently does a wide variety of things, and not just those functions favoured by functional definitions. In this regard, it might be helpful to adopt a Weberian strategy. Weber famously refused to define religion, but did identify religion rather straightforwardly as religious systems of life regulation (Weber, 1946). What we would therefore be looking for are nonreligious systems of life regulation. This, in turn, would lead us to the main features of religious systems of life regulation as they express themselves in a wide variety of areas, for instance, in understandings and dealing with life passages, nature, education, migration (or significant life disruption), sex and sexual conduct, morality/ethics, community/kinship, to mention only a few. In each of these areas, nonreligious understandings and social performances would be those without postulated sacredness, transcendence, or extra-biological agencies and no content from religions. Instead, they would consist in, by contrast,

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‘materialistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ determinations whose positive content would consist in specific cognitive and performative components. A brief look at the areas of life passages, sex, and foodways can serve to illustrate. Life passages include birth, childhood/puberty, marriage or family formation, and death/dying. Much religion is occupied with these passages, and rituals associated with them are among the last things that individuals moving towards a nonreligious identity appear to drop. Nonreligious ways of acting with regard to these would include ways of celebrating or marking them that are comparable and yet contain no assumption of transcendent or sacred agencies as actors, do not use recognized religion as a source of symbolization and interpretation, and may not bear any avowed relation to religion. Religious regulation of sexuality, gender, and sexual behaviour is a standard aspect of all religions that we generally recognize. But lack of such religious regulation does not mean no regulation. Nonreligious ways of structuring or regulating one’s sexuality, one’s gender, and one’s sexual relations, emotion, and behaviour would be ones understood and performed without reference to religious determinations. We know that several of the ‘hot button’ issues with relation to religion in our society are located in this area. One thinks, for instance, of the questions of homosexuality/non-cisgendered sexuality, abortion, contraception, or polygamy/polyamory. More than many of the areas under consideration, the difference and even conflict between religion and nonreligion seems to be playing itself out more clearly in this area than in many of the others. With regard to foodways, many if not most religions regulate food, what is (good) food, how one eats it, and with whom. And yet, at least as evident in much of Western society as these religious regulations are an increasing variety of movements, organizations, trends, and preferences that structure food consumption just as clearly, if not more, but not in a religious way. Here, we can think, for instance, of vegetarianism, veganism, raw foodism, paleo, and culturally based foodways. None of these have necessary or clear reference to any religion or to any transcendent agency, and many of them are only tangentially based in natural and biological science or medicine. One could say that they are based in ethical and faith-based selectivities, but not religious ones. Approaching nonreligion via this indirect route does not, of course, exclude other strategies, such as those that focus on express and organized nonreligious phenomena like atheist and humanist movements. Indeed, these are far easier to study because they take such express and visible

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form. Nonetheless, because nonreligion can clearly not be limited to such organized expressions, witness to which is that the vast majority of those who consider themselves to be nonreligious do not participate in them, a wider conceptualization strategy such as I have just suggested would seem to be necessary. Yet, the challenge then becomes, because these broader expressions of nonreligion do not take such express form, how to study and understand them in a useful and coherent way so as to be able to discern the level of their presence in society and then the impact that they may be having in what may be an increasingly post-religious era in many parts of global society. This challenge is therefore principally methodological and, in that context, also conceptual in the sense that first what we mean by nonreligion has to be operationalized so that it can be translated into research projects and generate data for analysing this nonreligion. If we accept that the nonreligion that we study has to bear a relation to religion, without being a replacement or substitute for religion, that is, an Ersatzreligion, and we further accept that an effective way of translating this requirement is to think in terms of nonreligious patterns of life regulation, then these patterns have to be translated into cognitive and performative components, in other words, beliefs and practices that we can recognize and that (nonreligious) people will display. Operationalizing nonreligion will therefore involve the identification of such beliefs and practices, as well as any social forms that express them, something best done through the analysis of both existing and research-generated texts, whether oral, written, or visual. Thus, for example, research could design survey questionnaires which ask people about what they believe and do with respect to one of the areas discussed above, areas that religion and nonreligion have in common. The actual questions could be adapted from existing instruments that measure attitudes and action in these regards, say by taking questions from social identity surveys and the like. Or the questions could be developed organically through using qualitative techniques like interviews and focus groups to get people to talk about how they relate to the areas in question. Such less-directed discussion could allow researchers to identify the language, ideas, and behaviours that nonreligious people now use or exhibit in these areas of life regulation, without them being imposed by the researcher on the basis of their own conceptualizations, theories, and existing research instruments. Moreover, data would be gathered using the same instruments from both nonreligious and religious people, and especially people who are in the zone between these two, for instance, the spiritual-but-not-religious, the culturally

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religious, marginally religious, the belongers without belief and the believers without belonging. This inclusion would be necessary in order to discern the degree to which, as it were, nonreligion is present even among the religious and quasi-religious. Let me give a couple of examples about how this might proceed and has already proceeded. Focus groups, ethnographic studies, interviews, or surveys on what people eat, why, how, and with whom, reveal a variety of attitudes and practices that are nonreligious in the above-­described sense, but that still exhibit the quality of regulating, to whatever extent, systematically: what do people consider to be food and what not; what is ‘good’ food and ‘bad’ food, what one should and shouldn’t eat. Why? To what degree do ethical, environmental, health, or scientific explanations enter the picture and to what degree do religious explanations still prevail, as in the above sense of involving sacredness, transcendence, or transcendent agency? Salonen in this volume and in other works is one example of the sort of research that pursues these questions (Salonen, 2018, 2019). The assumption is clear here: nonreligious people, like religious people, don’t eat just anything. They eat some things and not others; they consider some things better to eat than others; they deliberately avoid some that others do in fact eat, and they may seek out things that few other people eat. To what degree is eating (and cooking/preparing!) an activity that is group oriented, where it matters with whom one eats, and how one goes about eating with other people. The literature into these questions, although not often couched in terms of nonreligion, is actually quite substantial (see as further examples Askegaard et al., 2014; Coveney, 2006; Grauel, 2016). A second example could target sexual understandings and behaviours. Again, using the same qualitative and quantitative techniques, focus groups, interviews, and surveys, publications could reveal how nonreligious people, compared to religious people, understand sex, gender, and sexual behaviour. What in this area is recommended or not, permitted or forbidden? What is the source of the attitudes thus displayed? How do people put these beliefs into practice? One would go into this research on the assumption that nonreligious people regulate their sexual lives in a way analogous to the way religious people do, including, of course, the possibility of a disjuncture between attitudes/beliefs and actual behaviour. In this regard, it would be especially important to measure the degree to which nonreligious and religious people differ with regard to these regulatory beliefs and practices, including, of course, as concerns questions

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regarding the nature of sex, gender, and sexual activity/relations. The literature in the question of religion and sexuality is substantial, but relatively little attention has been paid to this question with nonreligion as a key variable (Wallis, 2019; Shipley & Dickey Young, 2020). It should be stressed that, in outlining these methodological strategies for studying nonreligion, the purpose of doing this relates to the dynamic relation between religion and nonreligion that I discussed at the outset. In a sense, the strategy may look like nothing more that researching worldviews or identities, and it is that to an extent. What makes it narrower than that, however, is that its aim is to look expressly at not just nonreligion, but also nonreligion in relation to religion in a context of growing nonreligion and significant controversies and conflicts regarding religion. Accordingly, part of the research would also have to include studying the attitudes and behaviours of the nonreligious towards religion and the religious. Are they positive, neutral, negative, or a mix? Do nonreligious people consider their orientations as (ideally) societally normative? Do they wish to limit religious expression, and if so, how? Without that additional dimension, the dynamic relation between religion and nonreligion will not become clear, and the importance of nonreligion cannot be properly judged. To summarize the argument and conclude: the study of nonreligion is important because of the growth of nonreligion in many (Western) populations and the attendant controversies with relation to religion that have been occurring at the same time. Studying nonreligion, however, must find ways to get beyond what nonreligion is not, namely, that it is not religion, to what nonreligion actually is in terms of social forms and individual orientations and actions. To do that we must as much as possible conceptualize nonreligion in terms of its dynamic relation with religion, because it is that dynamic relation that is at the core of the issues and the controversies. Accordingly, the suggestion is not to limit oneself to nonreligious forms and manifestations that have an avowed and express relation to religion like organized atheism or humanism, but to look at what nonreligious people believe and practice that is similar to what religion does for religious people, without being necessarily an Ersatz for religion, and to see how the nonreligious relate to religion independently or in conjunction with their nonreligious beliefs and practices. Methodologically, this implies rather standard research methods, but ones which are conceptualized with these theoretical requirements in mind. Happily, such research is now being done and we can hope for a great deal more in the future.

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References Askegaard, S., & al., e. (2014). Moralities in Food and Health Research. Journal of Marketing Management, 30(17–18), 1800–1832. Coveney, J. (2006). Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating. Routledge. Grauel, J. (2016). Being Authentic or Being Responsible? Food Consumption, Morality and the Presentation of Self. Journal of Consumer Culture, 16(3), 852–869. Lee, L. (2012). Talking About a Revolution: Terminology for the New Field of Non-religion Studies. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 27(1), 129–139. Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford University Press. Pew Research Center. (2019). In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at a Rapid Pace: An Update on America’s Changing Religious Landscape. Pew Research Center. Pollack, D., & Rosta, G. (2017). Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison. Oxford University Press. Quack, J. (2014). Outline of a Relational Approach to ‘Nonreligion’. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 26(4/5), 439–469. Quack, J., Schuh, C., & Kind, S. (2020). The Diversity of Nonreligion: Normativities and Contested Relations. Routledge. Salonen, A. S. (2018). Living and Dealing with Food in an Affluent Society—A Case for the Study of Lived (Non)Religion. Religions, 9(10), 306. Salonen, A. S. (2019). Dominion, Stewardship and Reconciliation in the Accounts of Ordinary People Eating Animals. Religions, 10(12), 699. Sharpe, E. J. (1986). Comparative Religion: A History (2nd ed.). Open Court. Shipley, H., & Dickey Young, P. (2020). Bisexuality, (Non)religion and Spirituality in Canadian Young Adults. In A.  K.-T.  Yip & A.  Toft (Eds.), Bisexuality, Religion and Spirituality (pp. 11–28). Routledge. Singleton, A. (2015). Are Religious ‘Nones’ Secular? The Case of the Nones in Australia. Journal of Belief and Values, 36(2), 239–243. Voas, D. (2009). The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. European Sociological Review, 25(2), 155–168. Voas, D., & Chaves, M. (2016). Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis? American Journal of Sociology, 121(5), 1517–1556. Wallis, S. (2019). I’m Not Really a Non-religious Person’: Diversity among Young People of No Religion. In E. Arweck & H. Shipley (Eds.), Young People and the Diversity of (Non) Religious Identities in International Perspective (pp. 149–164). Springer.

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Weber, M. (1946). Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions. In H.  Gerth & C.  W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 323–359). Oxford University Press. Woodhead, L. (2016). The Rise of ‘No Religion’ in Britain: The Emergence of a New Cultural Majority. Journal of the British Academy, 4, 245–261. Zuckerman, P. (Ed.). (2010). Atheism and Secularity. Praeger. Zuckerman, P., Galen, L. W., & Pasquale, F. L. (Eds.). (2016). The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

How New Is the Study of Nonreligion? Theological Contributions to the Emergent Reflection on Nonreligion in Social Sciences Solange Lefebvre

Abstract  How new is the study of nonreligion and how new is the phenomenon itself? Beyond statistics, there are many ways of reexamining the “golden era” of religion, when entire populations were seen as religious. Theoretically, nonreligion has a long history, especially in philosophy. The recent interest in nonreligion is based rather on empirical curiosity, seeking to know more about ordinary nones, the way they view the world and the meaning of life, and how they establish their lives on ethical principles. After a brief examination of the interest Christians have taken in the nonreligious, this chapter will explore a valuable and largely unexplored case study in this regard: the outcomes of the dialogue between Catholics and nonbelievers since the 1960s, particularly the meaning of faith, beyond religion, and the importance of common ground between all human beings. The theoretical proposal stemming from this research is that we should

S. Lefebvre (*) University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_3

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move away from the frequent reduction of nonreligion to atheism or agnosticism which is centered on certain sets of beliefs. This will enable us to get to the core, which is the deep human movement of faith that can be religious, not religious or both at once. Keywords  Faith • Catholic Church • Dialogue • Unbelief • Vatican II • Atheism How new is the study of nonreligion and how new is the phenomenon itself? Beyond statistics, there are many ways of reexamining the “golden era” of religion, when entire populations were seen as religious. Theoretically, nonreligion has a long history, especially in philosophy. In modern times, famous thinkers who were profoundly critical of religion have been very influential, notably Marx, Comte, Freud and Nietzsche. The recent interest in nonreligion is based rather on empirical curiosity, seeking to know more about ordinary “nones”, the way they view the world and the meaning of life, and how they establish their lives on ethical principles. After a brief examination of the interest Christians have taken in the nonreligious, this chapter will explore a valuable case study in this regard: the outcomes of the dialogue between Catholics and nonbelievers since the 1960s, particularly the meaning of faith, beyond religion, and the importance of common ground between all human beings.

To Be or Not to Be Religious The new interest in nonreligion certainly has a connection to statistics. Scholars wonder about what can be found behind the intriguing continuous rise of the nonreligious in national statistics during the last few decades. The way questions were asked in the different censuses, at least in Canada, is not unrelated to the present chapter. In 2001, with regard to the question on ‘religion’, Statistics Canada explained the following: ‘Asked in every decennial census since 1871, it focuses on the respondent’s religion even if he/she is not currently a practising member’ (Statistics Canada, 2001). Significantly, for the 2011 census, the meaning of the question about religion changed. From that point on, “religion refers to the person’s self-identification as having a connection or affiliation with any religious denomination, group, body, sect, cult or other religiously defined community or system of belief. Religion is not limited to formal

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membership in a religious organization or group” (Statistics Canada, 2013, 4). Even if we believe that most respondents do not read this explanation before answering, we can reasonably think that more people would declare themselves religious even if they were not raised in a religion or, on the contrary, nonreligious even if they were religiously educated. This means that, for example, an individual baptized as a Roman Catholic may declare that he or she has no religion. The same would hold true for Jews, Muslims or others. Religion or nonreligion is therefore not limited to formal membership, which partially refers to a more subjective understanding of religious belonging or not belonging. Some may think otherwise, that people would be more likely to identify as religious. Overall, what is important is the possibility of this self-declaration or self-­ identification at some point during the life cycle (Thiessen & Wilkins-­ Laflamme, 2020). There is a need for more research to better understand the imaginaries, motivations, stories and horizons behind it. We could wonder what statistics could have been gleaned from such a question in the past. Would we have discovered individuals who had received a religious education, but lived, thought and acted as nones? We must keep in mind that the option for nonreligion was only introduced in 1991 by Statistics Canada. In relation to this question, it could be of interest to take into account the recent history of Christianity’s theoretical reflections simply because for a long time, Christian theologians, sociologists and pastoral workers have given attention to the large gap between formal religious affiliation and true Christian commitment. They were not as concerned about affiliation as they were about faith, spiritual life, community commitment, social justice, true charity and practices. Even rites of passage such as baptism, first communion, confirmation, marriage or funerals often tended to be seen as a burden for church community leaders and volunteers. Responding week after week to such requests from indifferent individuals, whom they would never see again in their faith community, could be a great source of distress and disappointment for many of them. Through their pastoral work, committed Christians witnessed deep religious ruptures and heard many stories of doubt and unbelief. Nearly thirty years ago, the Catholic bishops of Quebec offered the following diagnosis: “Too many Catholics are acting in the Church as simple consumers of the services a particular religious institution can offer to them, without feeling they are full members of a communion, a family, one people” (Comité de recherche, 1992).

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Christian sociologists and sociologists who study Christianity have been looking at some of these gray zones of Christianity for decades. In his pioneer study on lived Catholicism in France, Gabriel Le Bras wrote that sociology did not care enough about the “impiety of our fathers”, “irreligion” (Le Bras, 1933, 195, 1956, 16) and “unbelief” (Le Bras, 1956, 564). Beneath the surface of Christian affiliation, one could find vague belief systems, non-Christian beliefs or nonbelief. Therefore, Christian thinkers produced surveys, theoretical and empirical research, about what they believed to be a growing problem, year after year during the twentieth century and even before: what they called the increasing crisis of faith and Christianity in the modern and contemporary world. Along the way, several terms were used in an effort to capture the complexity of this crisis, notably “religious indifference”, nonbelief (non-croyance) or unbelief (incroyance), in addition to reflections on atheism and agnosticism. The first essays on indifference were written as early as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example (Jones, 1705; Lamennais, 1829). Several slogans were often repeated during conferences, trying to grasp the spirit of the times, such as “Jesus without God”, “God without Jesus” or “humanity without God and Jesus”. Beyond these broad statements, did those Christians consider nonbelief as a valid option? Among other examples, it seems to me that the writings related to the dialogue between Roman Catholics and nonbelievers that took place after the Vatican II Council could be informative. Even if the intention behind this body of literature was to develop strategies to respond to what was seen as a crisis of faith, I contend that anyone who wishes to understand contemporary nonreligious persons could find very valuable research material in these writings. Through the dialogue, there was a significant exploration of the core theme of this volume: the “substantive content” of nonreligious imaginaries and what religious and nonreligious persons share, namely, some type of fundamental faith. It presents the advantage of going beyond the frequent reduction of nonreligion to the restrictive categories of atheism and agnosticism, which are related to the identification of religion as being faith in God as an object of adherence. After decades of innumerable public and academic surveys on beliefs in a wide range of religious themes, we can assume that a frequent common way of thinking confuses belief in these themes with religion, just as it confuses nonbelief in these themes with nonreligion.

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Roman Catholics and Nones One of the most famous texts from the Roman Catholic Vatican II Council (1962–1965) is the Pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world (Vatican II, 1965). It expresses an unprecedented openness of the millenary institution to modern ideas. It addresses the nonreligion that existed at that time mainly in terms of atheism and the question of God. Paragraphs 19–21 of the constitution contain a typology of atheism (including indifference and agnosticism), followed by an invitation to dialogue (Girardi, 1967; Goffi, 1983; Lefebure, 2015). In connection with common humanity, one of the unifying threads of the constitution, the council invites atheists and Roman Catholics to work together: While rejecting atheism, root and branch, the Church sincerely professes that all men, believers and unbelievers alike, ought to work for the rightful betterment of this world in which all alike live; such an ideal cannot be realized, however, apart from sincere and prudent dialogue. Hence the Church protests against the distinction which some state authorities make between believers and unbelievers, with prejudice to the fundamental rights of the human person. (Vatican II, 1965, par. 21)

With these ideas in mind, Pope Paul VI founded the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Nonbelievers at the end of Vatican II, in 1965. Subsequently major scholars, including sociologists, were invited to meetings like the Culture of Unbelief conference (Paul VI, 1969). With the official document Motu proprio Inde a Pontificatus of March 25, 1993, Pope John Paul II united that council with the Pontifical Council for Culture (which was created in 1982). He explained that the church wanted “to promote dialogue with non-Christian religions and with individuals and groups not claiming any religion, in the common search for a cultural communication with all people of good will” (John Paul II, 1982). The document still promoted dialogue, but no longer mentioned atheism and mostly insisted on evangelization: “The Council promotes the meeting between the saving message of the Gospel and the cultures of our time, often marked by disbelief or religious indifference, in order that they may be increasingly open to the Christian faith”. In the interest of better communication, the dialogue with nonbelievers changed its name after 2009, having “lost some of its visibility over the past two decades”, becoming

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“The Courtyard of the Gentiles” (Benedict XVI, 2009). It is also worth mentioning that in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI invited nonbelievers to an interreligious summit for the first time (Politi, 2015). In a few additional official statements, the common responsibility of Christians and nonbelievers was more clearly established on the agenda. The change of name also meant something new. The Courtyard was presented as a place of meeting and of diversity, similar to the one created by King Herod in the year 20-19 BC in the Second Temple of Jerusalem. In addition to the areas reserved to the members of the people of Israel (men, women, priests) in this temple there was a space in which everyone could enter, Jews and non-Jews, circumcised and uncircumcised, members or not of the chosen people, people educated in the law and people who weren’t. Here gathered the rabbis and teachers of the law ready to listen to people’s questions about God, and to respond in a respectful and compassionate exchange. This was the Court of the Gentiles (foreigners) and pagans (non-Jews), in Latin the atrium gentium, a space that everyone could traverse and could remain in, regardless of culture, language or religious profession (Pontifical Council for Culture website).

Cardinal Ravasi, the head of the Council, went further in an article, writing that the Courtyard of the Gentiles “strives to find what unites men, reason and fundamental values, rather than what divides them, that is, the cleavage of belief” (Ravasi, 2012, 115). Interestingly, since Vatican II, the vocabulary has shifted somewhat, from a strict binary relation between belief and unbelief, to the broader category of people believing in something else, the “Gentiles”. Beyond this official level, very interesting experiences of dialogues can be found in several local churches. For some reason, it seems that the richest period of the dialogue was between 1965 and the mid-1990s. The following section gives a few examples of how Christians understood those who were generally called nonbelievers and of how some of them told their stories through diverse publications, stemming from the dialogue that was conducted in Quebec, Canada. Writings from that period contain personal stories by nonbelievers and reflections on the common ground between believers and nonbelievers.

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From the True Faith to Several Faiths The invitation tells it all: If a meeting of believers-nonbelievers-distant interests you… If you are seeking answers in regard to faith If you want to study the phenomenon of religious disaffection and unbelief… The Unbelief and Faith Service offers… [Our translation]

This is how the Nouveau Dialogue [New Dialogue] journal, published by the Service incroyance et foi [Unbelief and Faith Service], presents the questions it addresses and the services it offers at its office in Montreal (Quebec) (Nouveau Dialogue, 1975). Founded in 1972 in the wake of the Council Vatican II, the review was at first named Dialogue, but became New Dialogue in 1975, and ceased publication in 2003 after producing 146 issues. Two collaborative books about unbelief in Quebec were also published (Charron et al., 1992; Richard et al., 1973). This brief section draws attention to some aspects of the dialogue, highlighting reflections that are little known outside the Catholic Church, but which could help us move away from a strictly negative comprehension of nones. Overall, this period of reflection on nonreligion was mainly an internal Catholic endeavor intended to better understand unbelievers, people who had left the Church or atheism. Committed, reflective and progressive Catholics who took the Council seriously tried to understand the sources of disinterest, criticism and the reasons for them. A reading of several writings reveals respect for nonbelief and of its implications, self-criticism of theologians and believers and the critical approach of the Church. It also shows harsh criticism of consumerism, rationalism, materialistic civilization and secularization. Some articles were written by nones themselves. In this short section, we will look at a single element that contributors deemed crucial to the connection between religious and nonreligious experience people: faith as being essential to the human condition, in the wake of multiple reflections in the twentieth century. Philosophers and theologians developed reflection on faith and belief as an internal dimension of any human being (Tillich, 1957; Welte, 1982). Sociologist Guy Rocher, introducing himself as a believer, tried to define unbelief sociologically at the beginning of the 1970s (Rocher, 1973). The contemporary state of unbelief, he argued, was less related to God than to the Church. Rocher spoke about sociological unbelief, since

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at that time in Quebec, it was already easier to declare oneself as a nonbeliever than a believer. He mentions an interesting example of the child of a Catholic public figure, Simone Chartrand, who confessed to his mother that he had lost his faith months ago, as an example of the way unbelief was making its way into younger generations. Finally, he presented unbelief as religious dissatisfaction, as mystical or social justice aspirations were not being met by the Catholic Church. In the second part of the article, he presented an idea that seems central to the new dialogue. Nonbelievers believe in something else: “unbelief is very often not a negation, but the affirmation of another faith” (Rocher, 1973, 22), faith in humanity, in the present life, in History (Marxist perspective). By saying this, he endorsed criticism of nonbelievers who were interviewed in 1970 by journalist Jean-­ Pierre Proulx. When asked what they thought about the creation of the Catholic office in Canada, they spontaneously replied by presenting themselves more positively. “For my part, I try to define myself by positive factors. So, I am a socialist and a humanist”, said sociologist Marcel Rioux. “I object to being defined as an unbeliever. I don’t believe in the same thing, that’s all”, explained the television producer Jean Letarte (Proulx, 1973, 305–306). Theologian André Charron explains the multiple meanings of the term “incroyance” (nonbelief) and articulates an interesting critique of the term (Charron, 1976). To him, the terms “nonbelief” and “nonbelievers” sound ambiguous and inadequate, partly because they were forged inside the Christian worldview system, as “the” reference. With Christian faith being the reference point, these post-Christian words emphasize the privative dimensions of nonbelief. To work around this difficulty, Charron suggests a distinction between belief and faith. If people can have all sorts of beliefs, faith implies a more profound attitude and nonbelievers develop diverse faiths as fundamental options. Charron opens the discussion on the way a life is lived and accomplished, beyond belief or unbelief, beyond religion itself. In another text, he refines the typology, making a difference between believe (croire), belief (croyance), conviction, trust and faith. He presents faith as the “most serious, unifying and fulfilling way of believing” (Charron, 1992, 117), as a spiritual option beyond religions. Lastly, among the stories of concrete dialogue between Catholics and nonbelievers, one story illustrates a crucial aspect of the several initiatives around dialogue during the past decades. A group of about twenty people met many times and came to the conclusion that they preferred an “acted dialogue” (dialogue agi), instead of a “spoken dialog” (dialogue parlé).

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After a few discussions about religion and nonbelief, the nones told the group that discussion about religion did not sound very interesting to them. A young woman asked to talk instead about social engagement. A few meetings were organized around social inequalities, and then the group began a reflection on common values and the need for concrete actions. Though some of the members went back to their initial interest, namely, discussion of questions of meaning, the others decided the following: “After several months of common progress, we believe that we must end the dialogue and work together on common projects” (Leduc, 1973, 341). For future research, it would be worth analyzing in more detail the outcomes of the dialogue conducted between the Catholic Church and “the believers in something else”. This dialogue preceded the introduction of the statistical group of people declaring themselves as nonreligious.

Conclusion: Shift from a Focus on Beliefs to a Focus on What We Believe in This chapter has primarily raised two issues of reflection. First, the redefining of faith and belief to include the convictions of all people that were undertaken by several Christian thinkers, at least in Quebec, to open the dialogue on some common ground between individuals with or without religion. As additional examples, at about the same time, two extensive empirical research studies were conducted by Christian sociologists and sociologists of Christianity, respectively, in the greater Montreal region and in Quebec City. The first one, which had a wide reception, presented believing as a crucial human dynamic, stating, for example, how some interviewees had great difficulty with a belief (or trust) in love, in others and in the future (Grand’Maison et al., 1995). It pointed out a more fundamental placement of faith in human life. The second study was based on the following statement: ‘The border between unbelief and belief has shifted toward a plurality of beliefs, which are first a social and anthropological fact, before being religious. All humans have beliefs, that is, they all have access to an imaginary space which goes beyond rationality and logic, and this relationship structures their existence with the world and with the Other’ (Lemieux & Milot, 1992). How could the reflective movement on nones focus on the relevance of the category of faith or fundamental belief in a way that supports the meaning of life? After all, the movement still

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carries within itself that negativity by which world religions have often categorized non-members. The second key issue studied in this chapter concerns the common ground between people of all faiths, either religious or nonreligious, at the center of the dialogue. Similarly, through decades of dialogue, different religions often concluded that discussions about the content of different faiths or religions could be very difficult, and the disputes insurmountable. Dialogue was often more easily established through joint action aimed at solving common problems, or through reflection on what we have profoundly in common: the human condition and the fragility of our world. A relevant reflection on nonreligion could constantly ask itself the following question: Why, despite decades of effort, is our collective imagination still carrying a deep propensity to create spaces where some are inside and others are outside? In a world that requires participation from everyone in order to be repaired, preserved and cherished, a new imaginary around belief is needed, one modeled on a shift from a focus on a religious/nonreligious set of beliefs to a focus on what we deeply believe in. Acknowledgments  Solange Lefebvre would like to thank André Charron for facilitating access to documents and clarifying a few questions. In regard to the preparation of this article, the author would like to acknowledge the support of her research through her Research Chair in the Management of Cultural and Religious Diversity. She thanks Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme who kindly discussed matters of Canadian statistics. She is grateful to Liane Grant for her editorial assistance and linguistic revisions.

References Benedict XVI. (2009, December 21). Address to the Roman Curia. Retrieved July 2, 2020, from http://www.cultura.va/content/cultura/en/dipartimenti/ ateismo-­e-­non-­credenza/discorso-­di-­fondazione-­di-­benedetto-­xvi.html. Charron, A. (1976). Qu’est-ce que l’incroyance ? Précisions et définitions [What Is Unbelief ? Precisions and Definitions]. Nouveau Dialogue, 17, 9–21. Charron, A. (1992). Croyances et incroyances: Qu’est-ce à dire ? [Belief and Unbelief: What Does it Mean?]. In A. Charron, R. Lemieux, & Y. R. Théroux (Eds.), Croyances et incroyances au Québec [Belief and Unbelief in Quebec] (pp. 108–151). Fides. Charron, A., Lemieux, R., & Théroux, Y. R. (1992). Croyances et incroyances au Québec [Belief and Unbelief in Quebec]. Fides.

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Comité de Recherche de l’Assemblée des évêques du Québec sur les communautés chrétiennes locales [Research Committee of the Quebec Assembly of Bishops on Local Christian Communities]. (1992). Risquer l’avenir: bilan d’enquête et prospective [Risking the Future: Assessment and Prospective]. Fides. Girardi, J. (1967). L’Église face à l’humanisme athée [The Church in the Face of Atheistic Humanism. In Vatican II, L’Église dans le monde ce temps. Commentaires [Vatican II.  The Church in the Modern World. Comments] (T. II, pp. 329–387). Cerf. Goffi, T. (1983). Athée [Atheist]. In S. De Fiores, & G. Tullo (Eds.), Dictionnaire de la vie spirituelle [Dictionary of Spiritual Life] (pp. 70–77). Cerf. Grand’Maison, J., et  al. (1995). Le défi des générations [The Challenge of Generations]. Fides. John Paul II. (1982). Letter to Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Secretary of State. 20 May 1982; Insegnamenti, vol. V/2, 1982, pp. 1777 ff.); quoted in Motu proprio, Ibid. Jones, C. (2010, 17051). Against Indifference in Religion. A sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Wells, Before the Right Honourable the Lord Chief Baron Ward, and… London: Gale ECCO. Lamennais, F. R. de (1895, 18291). Essays on Indifference in Matters of Religion. John Macqueen. Le Bras, G. (1933). De l’état présent de la pratique religieuse en France [About the Present State of Religious Practice in France]. Revue de folklore français, IV, 193–206. Le Bras, G. (1956). Études de sociologie religieuse [Studies of Religious Sociology]. T. II, PUF. Leduc, L. (1973). Cheminement de deux groupes montréalais. In J.  Richard, P.-E. Langevin, & E. TrÉpanier (Eds.), L’incroyance au Québec. Approches phénoménologiques, théologiques et pastorales [Nonbelief in Quebec. Phenomenological, Theological and Pastoral Approaches] (pp. 329–341). Fides. Lefebure, L. D. (2015). Is There Reason for Hope? The Second Vatican Council and Catholic Interreligious Relations. In L.  Van Rompay, S.  Miglarese, & D. Morgan (Eds.), The Long Shadow of Vatican II. Living Faith and Negotiating Authority since the Second Vatican Council (pp.  8–36). University of North Carolina Press. Lemieux, R., & Milot, M.. (Eds.) (1992). Les croyances des Québécois. Esquisses pour une approche empirique [Beliefs of Quebeckers. Sketches for an Empirical Approach]. Presses de l’Université Laval. Nouveau Dialogue [New Dialog] (August 1975). Paul VI. (1969). Address of Paul VI to the Participants in the Symposium on “The Culture of Unbelief”. Thursday, March 27. Retrieved June 15, 2020, from http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-­vi/en/speeches/1969/march/documents/hf_p-­vi_spe_19690327_cultura-­non-­credenza.html

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Politi, M. (2015). Walking with Unbelievers. In P.  Francis (Ed.), Among the Wolves. The Inside Story of a Revolution. Columbia University Press. Pontifical Council for Culture, Dialogue with non-believers/Courtyard of the Gentiles. Retrieved April 5, 2020, from http://www.cultura.va/content/cultura/en/dipartimenti/ateismo-­e-­non-­credenza.html. https://www.cortiledeigentili.com/. Proulx, J.-P. (1973). Interview de trois croyants: L’Église veut nous inviter à dialoguer: nous dialoguons déjà [Interview with Three Believers: The Church Wants to Invite Us to Dialog: We Already Dialogue]. In J.  Richard, P.-É. Langevin, & E. TrÉpanier (Eds.), L’incroyance au Québec. Approches phénoménologiques, théologiques et pastorales [Nonbelief in Quebec. Phenomenological, Theological and Pastoral Approaches] (pp. 305–310). Fides. Ravasi, G. (2012). Le Parvis des gentils [The Courtyard of the Gentiles]. Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale, 268 (1), 113–119. Retrieved May 14, 2020, from http://www.cultura.va/content/cultura/en/dipartimenti/ateismo-­e-­ non-­credenza/che-­cos-­e-­il-­cortile-­dei-­gentili%2D%2D.html Richard, J., Langevin, P.-É., & TrÉpanier, E. (1973). L’incroyance au Québec. Approches phénoménologiques, théologiques et pastorales [Nonbelief in Quebec. Phenomenological, Theological and Pastoral Approaches]. Fides. Rocher, G. (1973). L’incroyance comme phénomène sociologique [Nonbelief as a Sociological Phenomenon]. In J. Richard, P.-É. Langevin, &, E. TrÉpanier (Eds.), L’incroyance au Québec. Approches phénoménologiques, théologiques et pastorales [Nonbelief in Quebec. Phenomenological, Theological and Pastoral Approaches] (pp. 13–30). Fides. Statistics Canada. (2001). Content of the 2001 Census Questionnaires, May 1. Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/english/census01/Info/content.cfm. Statistics Canada. (2013). Religion Reference Guide. National Household Survey 2011. Minister of Industry. Catalogue no. 99-010-X2011010, p. 4. Thiessen, J., & Wilkins-Laflamme, S. (2020). None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the U.S. and Canada. New York University Press. Tillich, P. 2001 (19571). Dynamics of Faith. HarperCollins. Vatican II. (1965). Pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world. Gaudium et spes, Promulgated by Pope Paul VI, December 7. Retrieved April 5, 2020, from http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-­ii_const_19651207_gaudium-­et-­spes_en.html. Welte, B. (1982). Qu’est-ce que croire ? [What is Faith]. Fides.

PART II

Now What?

CHAPTER 4

Going, Going, Gone? Canadian Churches and the Rise of Non-religion Brian Clarke

Abstract  Every ten years Statistics Canada offers an invaluable snapshot of Canadians’ religious affiliation as part of its census enumeration. Until the 1960s almost every Canadian claimed religious affiliation, with just 0.5% identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation. Since then, the “nones” have rocketed up to almost a quarter of the population. Baby boomer men initiated this trend away from religious affiliation, but now they are joined by young female and male adults, who are also raising their own children with no religious affiliation. While this remains a predominantly white Canadian trend, these non-affiliated Canadians are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Since the 1960s, there has also been a sharp increase among those who have only a nominal connection with a Christian denomination, substantially increasing those Canadians who could potentially disaffiliate completely. Having no religious affiliation is now part of

B. Clarke (*) Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_4

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Canada’s culturally diverse landscape, and this development has implications for the vitality of Canada’s civil society, which churches were once a formative part of. Keywords  Decline in religious affiliation • No religion • Secularization • Religion in Canada “Gone by 2040?” So went the front-page headline of the January 2020 issue of the Anglican Journal, the national newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada, for an article based on a statistical report to the church’s House of Bishops (Folkins, 2020: 1, 6–8). That report and its dire prediction that based on existing trends the church would disappear from Canada by 2040 had been leaked on social media some two months earlier, sparking lively commentary in the religious media (Anglican Samizdat, 2019). Significantly, only two mainstream media outlets picked up the story (Longhurst, 2019; Rodeck, 2019). Only a few years earlier, in 2006, a PowerPoint presentation to the bishops that predicted “the last Anglican will leave the church in 2061” had at least garnered the attention of the National Post (Hunter, 2006: A 17). (For clarification of exactly what occurred at the meeting of the House of Bishops, see Larmondin, 2006:4). That a major Canadian denomination was hemorrhaging members and facing extinction was apparently old news and of no great interest to the wider Canadian public. The fact of the matter is that the Anglican Church of Canada had been losing members since the 1960s (Table  4.1). But even so, the rate of decline in just six years was startling. Clocking in at a rate of decline of almost 45%, that was more than double the highest previous rate of decline in the 1990s, and that was for a longer period of ten years. Indeed from 1961 (close to the peak in membership reached in 1964) until 2017, church membership tumbled by about three-quarters. Nor was the Anglican Church unique in this. During the same period, from 1961 to 2017 the United Church of Canada slumped by just over three-fifths (United Church of Canada 1962 and 2018); the Presbyterian Church in Canada dropped by slightly less than three-fifths (Presbyterian Church in Canada 1962 and 2018); and the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec (formerly the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec), which is now evangelically aligned, fell by well over two-fifths (Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec, 2020). Even the Pentecostal Assemblies of

%

Member- Change ship 1981

%

Member- Change ship 1991

1981–1991 %

Member-­ Change ship 2001

1991–2001 %

Member- Change ship 2017

2001–2017 %

262,584 24.0 1,109,221 −249,238 −18.3 921.545 −187,676 −16.9 801,963 −119,5822 −13.0 641,845 −160,118 −20.0 357,123 −284,722 −44.4

Change

1971–1981

Source: General Synod, Anglican Church of Canada and “Statistics Report for House of Bishops,” 2019

1,095, 1,358, 875 459

Membership 1971

Mem­ Member- Change bership ship  1961

%

1961–1971

1951–1961

1951

Table 4.1  Anglican Church of Canada membership 1951–2017

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Canada—once billed as Canada’s fastest growing denomination—is showing signs of stagnation in its membership. True, between 1961 and 2017, it grew nearly 1.5 times, compared to the national increase in population of just over 90%. But that was largely a function of stellar growth that took place earlier. The Assembly continues to grow, but it now does so at a much slower rate. Between 2007 and 2017, the denomination grew by just under 6.5% (Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, 2020). That may seem impressive, but in approximately the same interval, the country’s population grew by almost twice that number, at nearly 12%. In short, even a growing denomination, which in the past has demonstrated outstanding success in increasing its membership, is losing ground in terms of its share of the population. So if Canada’s largest Protestant churches are declining and some of its smaller denominations are growing more slowly than the population as a whole, what are Canadians switching to? Fortunately, the data needed to answer that question can be found in the national census. Since the first Federal census was conducted in 1871, Canadians have been asked to identify their religious affiliation. Through the census we can track over time those who identify as something—be it Anglican, Muslim, or what have you—as well as those who say they have no religion. The one downside to the census is that the question on religious affiliation is only asked every ten years as opposed to other salient social characteristics such as income, ethnicity, “Visible Minority” status, and so on that are surveyed every five years. Moreover, the returns usually appear two years or so after the census has been conducted. The result is something akin to taking a photograph through a rear view mirror of a road traveled and then waiting a few years to see the developed picture. At a time when one can do a selfie in the time it takes to whip out one’s phone, this all seems very passé, but the data the census yields is the best we have even if it isn’t as timely as one would hope. The first thing to be noted is that the census confirms the general pattern of decline that we have seen in the denominational membership statistics examined so far (Table  4.2). Census affiliation may have peaked later than it did on the membership rolls—1971 for all three—but all three saw dramatic declines from 1961 through to 2011: down by a third for Anglicans; United Church well over two-fifths; and just over two-fifths for Presbyterians. These rates of decline are admittedly lower than that seen in denomination membership rolls. Now it is true that denominational membership rolls are often lagging indicators: national denominations rely on

1,754,368 2,060,720 2,409,068 2,543,180 2,436,375 2,188,115 2,035,500 1,631,845

Census

835,753 1,095,875 1,358,459 1,109,221 921,545 801,963 641,845 532,731b

Membershipa

Anglican

2.1 1.9 1.8 2.3 2.6 2.7 3.2 3.1

Ratio 830,597 781,747 818,558 872,335 812,105 636,295 409,830 472,380

Census

For 2008 only

b

a

Sunday School enrolment not available for the entire period surveyed

Source: Denominational Statistics; Census of Canada, 1941–2001

1941 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2011

Year

254,607 256,044 312,797 250,090 211,458 190,080 156,940 119,900

Membership and Sunday School

Presbyterian

Table 4.2  Comparison of denominational statistics to census affiliates

3.3 3.1 2.6 3.5 3.8 3.4 2.6 3.9

Ratio 2,208,658 2,867,271 3,664,008 3,768,800 3,758,015 3,093,120 2,839,125 2,007,615

Census

1,227,522 1,385,040 1,794,324 1,344,710 1,131,755 973,056 764,023 539,547

Membership and Sunday School

United

1.8 2.1 2.0 2.8 3.3 3.2 3.7 3.7

Ratio

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individual congregations to compile membership statistics, and there is a tendency for individuals to remain on the rolls even after they have ceased to be involved in the life of the congregation. But there are good reasons to think that the census functions even more markedly as a lagging indicator than denominationally compiled data. This can be seen in the ratio of census affiliates to members (Table 4.2). What stands out is that the ratio of census affiliates to membership by and large increased, even as membership fell, and kept falling at precipitous rates. So far, only three Protestant denominations have come under examination using the census. The reason for this is a straightforward one. Historically, Canadian Protestantism has been dominated by just three denominations. In addition to the Anglican Church of Canada, the United Church of Canada along with the Presbyterian Church in Canada were by far the largest denominations in the country, and they constituted the Protestant mainstream. In 1961 they comprised well over three-quarters of Canada’s Protestant population. Add in the Baptists and Lutherans, who were prominent regionally, and the figure rises to more than 9 in 10. When it comes to demographic shifts, size matters. Given their size, what happens to the largest denominations affects what happens to the Protestant population as a whole. So looking at the three largest Protestant denominations once more: they went from 78.1% of the Protestant population in 1961 to 56.5% in 2011. Moreover, the scale of their losses in census affiliates was so large that it directly affected the standing of Protestants as a whole. As a direct result of their decline, the total Protestant population went down from 48.4% (at the time 46.8% of Canadians were Roman Catholic) of the national population in 1961 to just 22.1% in 2011. So where did these “missing” Protestants end up? The most obvious place to look is “No religion.” Those who identify as having “No Religion” has seen nothing short of a meteoric rise since 1961. In that year, under 0.5%—note the decimal point—of Canadians so identified. By 2011, the figure stood at 23.6%. The first thing to be said here is that this category comprises those who said they had “No religion” as opposed to those who identified as Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists, or some other similar category. The second thing to be said is that “No religion” accounts for the overwhelming number of Canadians classified under the general rubric of “No religious affiliation,” which includes Atheists and others. As of 2011, Atheists account for 0.6% of all those who have “No religious affiliation”; Agnostics another 0.4%; and Humanists just 0.04%. “No religion,” then, accounts for 98.6% of those listed as

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Table 4.3  No religious affiliation

Year

All of Canada (%)

1971 1981 1991 2001 2011

4.3 7.4 12.5 16.5 23.9

49

Quebec (%) 1.3 2.1 3.9 5.8 12.1

Source: Census of Canada, 1971–2001, and National Household Survey, 2011

having “No religious affiliation.” Only a very small number of those with “No religious affiliation” identify as something specific, whether it be as Atheist, Agnostic, and so on. Still, when Atheists and others are added into the mix, “No religious affiliation” moves up another three-tenths of 1% to 23.9% of the Canadian population. The most striking feature about “No religious affiliation” is its exceptional growth rate (Table 4.3). During the 1970s and 1980s, “No religious affiliation” grew at a rate of at least 1.7 times in each decade. Even after “No religious affiliation” passed the 3.3 million mark in 1991, it continued to grow at stellar rates, at 1.3 times in the 1990s and 1.4 times in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. True, as one would expect, the growth rate of “No religious affiliation” slowed down as it became larger, but the decrease is marginal. “No religious affiliation” is still growing at a multiple rate and has done so for five decades. That in itself is remarkable. So what is the profile of those who self-identify on the census as one way or another having “No religious affiliation”? About one in seven (13.8%) are of Asian background. Many of them are familiar with and perhaps even engage in various forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, and the like that simply don’t fit in with the understanding of religion and religious affiliation prevalent in the West. Another 5.6% are Aboriginal, such as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis. These are the only two significant minorities among those of “No religious affiliations.” That means that the vast majority of those with “No religious affiliation” are of European origin, at just over three-quarters (76.7%). What, then, can we say about the religious background of these Canadians before they opted for “No religious affiliation”? As we have seen, Roman Catholics comprise a large slice of the population of European origin. Now, when it comes to Roman Catholics we need to keep in mind that they are

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different. One thing we know about Roman Catholics is that their identity persists, and it persists even among those who are no longer involved in church life. The province of Quebec provides a classic example of this point (Table  4.3). “No religious affiliation” has always come in much lower than in the rest of the country. In 1971, when that category first jumped in the rest of the country, it was 1.3% of the province’s population. In 1991, it was still just 3.9%, and even in 2001 at 5.8%. Only in 2011 did significant movement occur. In that year, “No religious affiliation” stood at 12.1% and even then it is still under a half of the level observed nationally. Yet another way to map this is to look at those whose first language is French. When looked at across the country, francophones made up just under one in ten of all those with “No religious affiliation” in 2011. Roman Catholics from other European backgrounds likely don’t have as high an identification with Catholicism as Francophones, but given that this identity is often associated with ethnic identity—for example, among Poles, Italians, and such—it remains quite strong, even if the 2011 returns revealed for the first time some slippage. The portrait for those who chose “No religious affiliation” drawn so far, then, looks like this. They are overwhelmingly of European origin, that is, in plain language, white Canadians as opposed to Visible Minority (a category used in the census) or Aboriginal Canadians. The vast majority of them self-identify as having “No religion,” as opposed to being Atheists or something else specific. Furthermore, as we have seen, this is something that many have switched to: former “somethings” become “nones”. Finally, these are Canadians who formerly had and would have identified as affiliating with a specific Protestant denomination. “No religious affiliation” began as largely a Baby Boomer phenomenon. In 1991, Boomers accounted for well over two-fifths of those with “No religious affiliation.” Since then, the age profile has broadened considerably. The middle-aged now account for a significant proportion of those with “No religious affiliation.” Moreover, “No religious affiliation” has become a second—or even third—generation phenomenon. As this succession of generations suggests, “No religious affiliation” is no longer primarily a Boomer phenomenon, although it began as one. Indeed, “No religious affiliation” has a large proportion of children, that is, those under the age of 14, and this has been so for at least 30 years. As seen in Table 4.4, about one-fifth of all those with no religious affiliation in 2001 and 2011 were under the age of 14. So the under 14’s had a remarkable share of all those who were identified as having “No religious affiliation.” In addition,

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Table 4.4  No religious affiliation by age Age 2001 2011

0–14 (%)

15–24 (%)

25–44 (%)

45–64 (%)

65+ (%)

22.9 20.2

16.8 15.8

35.2 32.6

19.5 24.4

6.2 6.9

Source: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, and National Household Survey, 2011 Percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding

the under 14’s with “No religious affiliation” also claimed a large segment of their age cohort. Indeed, the proportion of all those under 14 who were identified as having “No religious affiliation” went up from a fifth in 2001 to just under one-third in 2011. Moreover, the former trend—the proportion of those with “No religious affiliation” who are under 14—is firmly entrenched. As far back as 1981 and 1991, the under 14’s accounted for over a quarter of those with “No religious affiliation.” And now, this cohort from that time has come of age, and they themselves are raising children. A rough estimate of those with “No religious affiliation” in these two decades who would have been between ages 25 and 34 in 2011 comes to a little over half a million Canadians in their prime child-raising years. The census returns do not allow for a cross tabulation that would link those of “No religious affiliation” with children who also identified as having “No religious affiliation,” but the probability is very high that the vast majority of these Canadians are themselves bringing up their children with “No religious affiliation.” What this cohort analysis reveals is that “No religious affiliation” has become deep-seated intergenerational phenomenon, now entering its third generation. Finally, to complete the profile of “No religious affiliation” we need also to look at its distribution by sex. It began as being an overwhelmingly male phenomenon, with males accounting for just over 60% of the group (Table 4.5). As of 2011, males are still majority, but only by a small margin. A helpful way to look at how the balance between the sexes (it should be noted that Statistics Canada categorizes those enumerated by sex not by gender) is to look at the male-to-female ratio and how that has changed over time. In 1971, males were 1.5 times more likely to be identified with “No religious affiliation” compared to females. Between then and 2011 that ratio dropped by almost a quarter to 1.16, while male-to-female ratio in overall population moved in the opposite direction by just three-tenths of 1%. That means the shift in the decline of the male-to-female ratio has

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Table 4.5  No religious affiliation by sex Year

All (%)

Male (%)

Female (%)

Male-to-female ratio

Male-to-female ratio in total population

1971 1981 1991 2001 2011

4.3 7.4 12.5 16.5 23.9

60.3 57.9 55.8 54.6 53.8

39.9 42.1 44.2 45.4 46.2

1.51 1.38 1.26 1.20 1.16

1.00 0.98 0.97 0.96 0.97

Source: Census of Canada, 1971–2001, and National Household Survey, 2011

occurred because females are increasingly opting to identify as having “No religious affiliation.” Yet again, we are seeing how “No religious affiliation” has remarkably broadened its demographic base. Those with “No religious affiliation” account for a significant part of the Canadian population. That said, Stuart Macdonald and I have argued in Leaving Christianity, they represent the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Once one adds those who identify with one or another Christian denomination on the census who actually aren’t involved in organized religion along with those who claim a generic identification such as Protestant or Christian—as we argued, many though not all generic Christians are also disengaged—something like 55% of the total Canadian population no longer participates in organized Christianity (Clarke & Macdonald, 2017: 202–211). By any measure that’s a huge shift for a country that was once by and large a church-going nation. To be sure, there were regional differences. Many in British Columbia, especially those living on the coast, have had a long history of not being involved in organized Christianity. But what is happening now is quite different. Before the 1960s, it was widely taken for granted that Canadians belonged to a specific denomination or religion, in the case of Jews and other non-Christians. In 1961, the preamble to the published returns noted that “enumerators were instructed to record the specific religious body, denomination, sect or community” (Census of Canada, 1962:1). The preamble explained that enumerators “were to inquire more fully when ‘Christian’, ‘Protestant’, ‘Believer’, etc. were reported but were to accept these if a specific denomination could not be given.” The assumption was that nearly everyone was a religious something and a specific something at that. As for “No religion,” as we have seen, as late as 1961 very few Canadians identified themselves that way. One of the reasons why it was so low was

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that until 1961 enumeration was done in person and the questioning for census was conducted one on one with the head of the household in their home. That the enumeration was conducted in person by a representative of the government would mean that respondents were facing considerable pressure to conform to generally accepted expectations. The most telling indication, though, that “none” was not seen as a recognized option is the category simply doesn’t appear in the published returns. The “nones” were lumped in with “Other,” along with world religions such as Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam as well Christian denominations such as those in the Reformed tradition or in the Eastern Orthodox tradition other than Greek Orthodox, to mention only some of religious bodies not listed in the printed returns. All of which accounted for a little less than 2.5% of the Canadian population. We would have to wait till 1973, when the 1971 census returns were first published and those with “No religion”—the category then used—were reported in a separate breakout, which tracked them as far back as 1921. Until then religious nones simply weren’t seen to be significant enough to report. That shows the extent to which religious conformity could be taken for granted as late as 1962, when the results of the 1961 census were first reported, and it underscores what the subsequent upheavals of the 1960s did to shake that assumption and the conventions associated with it. With the appearance of the 1971 census results in the fall of 1973, it was clear that religious nones, at 4.3%, were a significant segment of the national population. The following census conducted in 1981 confirmed that the nones were indeed a notable part of the Canadian population and a rapidly growing one at that, clocking in at a tremendous 1.7 times growth rate in just ten years. Moreover, even though those with “No religious affiliation” have come to comprise a large part of the population and can be counted in the millions, they continue to grow at a strong clip, with rate of increase of 1.3 times in 2001 and more recently in 2011 at 1.4 times. As Callum Brown has argued, having no religion is a new form of “social belonging” and has become “an accepted part of cultural diversity” (Brown, 2012: 64 and 267). Moreover, as we have seen, what began as a youth-dominated phenomenon has considerably broadened its demographic base. In this regard, Charles Taylor’s category of “social imaginary” is a useful one. Taylor describes the social imaginary as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others … and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor, 2004: 23). So what are “the deeper normative notions and

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images that underlie” the expectation that one can claim non religion? As Woodhead has remarked in her analysis of this phenomenon in Britain, by so identifying oneself one is expressing “dis-affiliation” from organized religion. It is also, as she suggests, “a refusal of existing categories” (Woodhead, 2016: 252). Canadian survey data support non-religion as a negative option, one shaped by what one rejects. For example, in a 2017 survey Angus Reid classified Canadians on a spectrum from those of no faith to those “professing deep devotion.” At one end of the spectrum, non-believers account for 19% of the Canadian population, so not quite the same as those who say they have no religious preference, though there would be some overlap between the two. Of these non-believers, all affirmed they either definitely did not believe in a higher power or “don’t think so.” Sixty-nine percent said the word “religion” had negative connotations for them. More telling, 96% rejected the notion that they occasionally felt guilty “for not being more involved in a faith or religion” (Angus Reid Institute, 2017a: 3, 10, and 14). In other words they had walked away from organized religion and were quite comfortable doing so. In another survey conducted shortly after, 85% of non-believers declared that religious groups should have “Not much/No influence at all” in public life (Angus Reid Institute, 2017b:7). All this certainly confirms that the non-believers identified in Angus Reid’s polls are clear about what they reject. They are claiming freedom from religion, as they understand the term. But it also suggests that this not only a matter of negation; they also affirming their freedom to define who they are and to make up their own minds (on this see Woodhead, 2017: 253). As Callum Brown has observed, the meaning of no religion has changed. It has become an expression of “personal commitment just as much as that of ‘Christian’” (Brown, 2012: 60 and 63). And so it is now an identity that can be confidently affirmed and embraced. The implications of people’s drift away from organized Christianity for Canadian society are considerable. Take, for example, the health of Canadian civil society. At this point, it would be helpful to take a step back in time. Historically, churches have functioned as the primary gateways to civil society. In the past, people first learned how to donate as members of church groups for children and youth and as they got older gained their first opportunity to volunteer and learned the skills essential for associational life in church and beyond. In this regard, it is important to remember that the social form of organized Christianity that we are familiar first emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century when mass primary

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education was also being established. The essential building block was the congregation—a gathered local community that came together for regular corporate worship—that depended on its members’ voluntary support, in terms of both financial contributions and personal service, for its existence rather than on patrons or the state. Face-to-face interaction was essential for the congregation’s collective vitality and its salience to individual members. Indeed, it became for many their social home, where they experienced fellowship, made friends, and even met their mate. Moreover, participation in a congregation assumed a certain level of literacy and numeracy as congregations relied on a variety of written media (orders of service and hymnals for worship, minutes of committee meetings, membership rolls, and ledgers for administration) to function. In putting these skills to work, members of the congregation were also socialized into group work. Congregations occupied a unique space in their communities, one that lay between the private and the public spheres. They were open to the public, but could decide for themselves without regard to public authority how to conduct and organize their collective life. Their primary purpose was and is to sustain their members in the Christian life, but they were also important social centers in their community, hosting concerts, picnics, and other events. Christian congregations were ubiquitous—even now the United Church of Canada has more congregations than that other emblematic Canadian institution, the Tim Horton’s coffee chain—and more involved with the average Canadian than practically any other organization. Congregations were places where people met, and so they were open to the wider community and its concerns. In effect, they were critical institutions that mediated between private and public and have often served as launch pads for social engagement. In the course of the nineteenth century, congregations and their members spawned a wide variety of other voluntary associations, including benevolent associations that supported numerous social institutions, ranging from orphanages to nursing homes, was well as social service organizations, such as the YMCA or Shriners for Protestants and the St Vincent de Paul Society and Knights of Columbus for Roman Catholics. Christian social engagement not only found expression in remedial efforts of social service but also spawned the organizations that sustained major movements for social reform right up to the middle of the twentieth century. Congregations were part of a particular social ecology for associational life based upon face-to-face sociability and service as well as print media for

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general communication, a model that secular service organizations such as the Lions, Rotary, and Elks also adopted. Many of these secular service organizations like their congregational counterparts find themselves struggling today to attract support. Congregations socialized people into a certain form of associating and collective action, which is now waning. How alternative forms of organization based on social media will replace them is still unclear as is what impact they may have on Canadian society. Canadian congregations’ role in Canadian society has been diminishing for some time. Nevertheless, they still remain important hosts for many social service organizations such as Out of the Cold programs across the country and support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. As churches close, many outreach programs will find it increasingly difficult to find places with sufficient facilities where they can meet. Moreover, congregations remain unique in encouraging people to give of their financial resources and of their time. Ever since Statistics Canada started to examine the subject, there has been a strong association between regular church going (defined as once a week) and donating and volunteering and that has continued according to the latest General Social Survey to look at the topic, conducted in 2013. True, much of what these individuals gave and the time they contributed were directed to their church, but their average donation was 3.5 times that of other donors and they were 1.5 times more likely to volunteer (Turcotte, 2015: 2,7, and 10; Sinha, 2015: 6, 9, and 10). (This figure, however, is most certainly skewed by mandatory volunteer programs for school-aged youth). Not only do congregations rely on these donors and volunteers, so too do a host of other organizations. The fact of the matter, though, is that this population is both aging and dwindling. Based on the 2013 General Social Survey, Statistics Canada reported that charitable donations had increased by 23% in the nine years since 2004. Adjusting for both inflation and population growth means that donations had in fact declined on a per capita and real dollar basis by 4.6% (Turcotte, 2015: 4). Congregational decline, then, may well be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Those who care for the health and well-­ being of Canadian civil society should take note. And let us hope that, as in the nineteenth century, civil society can reinvent itself and keep Canadians engaged with one another and with the many challenges facing Canadian society.

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References Anglican Samizdat. (2019). Latest Anglican Church of Canada Membership and Attendance Statistics, posted October 5. Angus Reid Institute. (2017a). A Spectrum of Spirituality: Canadians Keep the Faith to Varying Degrees, But Few Reject It Entirely. Angus Reid Institute. (2017b). Faith and Religion in Public Life: Canadians Deeply Divided over the Role of Faith in the Public Square. Brown, C.  G. (2012). Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s. The Boydell Press. Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec. (2020). Membership Figures for 2017. Retrieved February 7, 2020, from https://baptist.ca/about. Census of Canada. (1962). Bulletin 1.2.6. Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Clarke, B., & Macdonald, S. (2017). Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada Since 1945. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Folkins, T. (2020). Gone by 2040? Statistics Report a ‘Wake-up Call’ to Church, Says Primate. Anglican Journal, 146(1), 6–8. Hunter, I. (2006). Will the Last Anglican Please Turn Off the Lights? National Post. January, 13(A), 17. Larmondin, L. (2006). The Story Behind the Story of Church Membership. Anglican Journal, 132(2), 4. Longhurst, J. (2019). ‘Dire’ Report Projects Near End of Anglican Church in Canada. Winnipeg Free Press, Posted December 11. Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. (2020). Fellowship Statistics. Presbyterian Church in Canada. (1962; 2018). Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly. Toronto: Presbyterian Church in Canada. Rodeck, E. (2019). Dwindling Congregations Force Winnipeg Faith Groups to Re-imagine Roles in Community. CBC News Winnipeg, Posted December 24. Sinha, M. (2015). Volunteering in Canada, 2004 to 2013. Statistics Canada. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press. Turcotte, M. (2015). Charitable Giving by Individuals. Statistics Canada. United Church of Canada. (1962; 2018). Year Book. United Church of Canada. Woodhead, L. (2016). The Rise of ‘no religion’ in Britain: The Emergence of new Cultural Majority. Journal of the British Academy, 4, 245–261. Woodhead, L. (2017). The Rise of ‘No Religion’: Towards an Explanation. Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, 78(3), 247–262.

CHAPTER 5

The Mobilization of Religious and Nonreligious Imaginaries in Argentine Sexual Politics Hugo H. Rabbia and Juan Marco Vaggione

Abstract  In a context where society is becoming less Catholic and more diverse, Argentina’s sexual politics presents the opportunity to explore the ways in which the social imaginaries regarding religion and nonreligion are contested. Based on qualitative data from in-depth interviews, documents, and websites analysis, this chapter focuses on the political mobilization of both religious and nonreligious imaginaries by those in favor of legalizing abortion during 2018 public debates. Particularly we consider two mobilizations: The Collective Apostasy Campaign—called “Not in my name”—and the main strategies of Catholics for Choice (Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir). Both mobilizations interpellate an ongoing growing segment of Argentina’s society that questioned the interference of Catholic Church and other religious actors in public debates. Both, also, advance in

H. H. Rabbia CONICET – IIPsi, National University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina J. M. Vaggione (*) CONICET – CIJS, National University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_5

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creating new political subjectivities: the Catholic dissident and the apostate. Through this analysis we discuss the complexity of religious and nonreligious imaginaries as central elements in contemporary sexual politics in Argentina. Keywords  Nonreligion • Laicite • Secular movement • Collective apostasy • Abortion rights • Argentina During 2018, Argentine society was involved in public discussions on laïcité (political secularization) that made newspapers’ headlines. Some media even defined this moment as a “laicism outbreak” in a country that has traditionally been considered as predominantly Catholic (Lavoz.com. ar, 2018, August 29). These discussions included, among others, the continuity of state funding for the Catholic Church; the presence of religious symbols in public buildings, such as universities, hospitals, and provincial legislatures; and the teaching of religion in public schools in the province of Salta, which has been considered as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Justice. But, above all, the leading discussion was (and still is) about the power of the Church’s hierarchy to decide the moral content of secular laws. These discussions were predominantly triggered by the abortion debate. After decades of feminist activism, for the first time a bill to legalize abortions performed during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy entered parliament and constituted a political landmark in 2018. Although that year the bill was rejected by the Senate after having been approved by Deputies, the five months that it took for the bill to be processed created a highly polarized debate among politicians and citizens that included the interplay between the religious and the nonreligious. Throughout the year and in different cities, public hearings, media debates, and massive street and social media demonstrations, it was possible to witness the emergence of two opposed positions on the how to regulate abortion. On the one side sat the (self-proclaimed) pro-life movement, supported by religious hierarchies and some believers. On the other side sat an increasingly visible and articulated feminist movement, identified with a green scarf. In general, the current wave of feminism in Argentina tends to oppose the public presence of religious beliefs and arguments which was replicated by slogans such as “Get your rosaries out of our ovaries” or “Church and State: separate issues” frequently chanted by demonstrators in favor of the bill (Felitti & Ramírez Morales, 2020).

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When a bill to legalize abortion was finally approved by the national Congress in late 2020, it was evident that most of the secularist demands which had resonated two years before were still part of the social conversation. In this case, the project was actively supported by the national government, and the social demonstrations were less frequent and numerous than in 2018 due to the context imposed by the pandemic of COVID-19. But a perceived cleavage between religious and nonreligious imaginaries was central to both abortion debates, circulating in social media and parliamentary discourses, though articulated in opposite ways and by different actors. Previous publications have focused on how the pro-life activism has moved beyond the religious-secular divide (Morán Faúndes & Peña Defago, 2016; Sgró Ruata, 2017). The concept of strategic secularism aims to capture the processes by which conservative actors mobilize both the religious and the secular according to different moments and contexts (Vaggione, 2005). Feminist activism has been more open to consider the experiences of (non)believers and progressives’ religious discourses as prompting their demands (Bosio et al., 2018), while promoting several— sometimes even opposing—conceptions of political secularism (Felitti & Prieto, 2018). In this sense, the Argentinian feminist movement politicizes alternative religious-nonreligious imaginaries in their fight toward legal abortion. And by doing so, they also open new paths to secular activism to achieve greater public resonance and to shape their political (and ethical) representation of a large group of people that feel alienated from the conservative religious doctrines on sexual regulation. In a country where Christian, particularly Catholic, influences on culture and politics are central, sexual politics constitutes a crucial arena for exploring the ways in which these imaginaries are constructed, interrelated, and demarcated. Based on qualitative data from in-depth interviews, documents, and websites analysis, our aim is to sketch an account of how religious and nonreligious imaginaries were politically mobilized by those in favor of legalizing abortion in 2018. As proposed by Quack (2014) and Lee (2015), here the “nonreligious” is taken as an open and relational field to be examined. Instead of considering the terms in aprioristic ways, we want to explore and disentangle the contextual cultural and political significances, articulations, and demarcations that become visible as part of contemporary sexual politics in Argentina. In particular, we consider two mobilizations: The Collective Apostasy campaign—called “Not in my name” (No en mi nombre)—and the main strategies of Catholics for

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Choice (Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir). Both cases allow us to explore the ways that the use of those imaginaries interpellates and offers positive meanings to two under-represented social positions,1 apostates and progressive religious groups, articulated around the same purpose: legalization of abortion.

Religious and Nonreligious Diversity in Contemporary Argentina Two myths are usually mobilized in Argentina to articulate the complex imbrications between religion, culture, and politics. On the one hand, the “myth of a Catholic nation” conceives that society was forged under Catholicism as an integral tradition that configures all communitarian experiences (Lida, 2013; Zanatta, 1999). Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, is often invoked as a main point of reference for social and moral values, everyday decisions, and life-cycle rituals. The Catholic Church, under this myth, is considered a privileged actor (both legally and economically2) and has a role in guaranteeing the social order and national unity, especially in moments of political upheaval or legitimacy crisis. The sustainers of this myth consider that Argentina has a common (Catholic) morality and culture that should be protected by the state (Mallimaci & Esquivel, 2013). In light of this myth, all actions or positions that do not respond to the official postulates of the Church, supposedly shared by the vast majority of the population, are to some extent object of suspicion or condemnation. In this sense, the myth of a Catholic nation is closed to the notion of “religious normativity” proposed by Quack et al. (2020). On the other hand, the myth of the Catholic nation does paradoxically coexist with the “myth of a lay republic” (Mallimaci, 2015). This myth consecrated the idea that Argentina is already a lay state, which is threatened by a constructed notion of Argentina as a Catholic, organic, and conservative nation. According to this myth, the only way to guarantee individual liberties 1  Social imaginaries not only rely on everyday representations and experiences of people but also serve as a collective mediation through which individuals understand their identities and place in the world (Gaonkar, 2002). This work deals mainly with this second aspect of the concept. 2  The National Constitution guarantees religious freedom, but also established State’s “support” of the Roman Catholic Church, which enjoys a privileged legal status compared to any other religion in the country (Vives, 2018).

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and social modernization would be to protect the constantly endangered state of secularism and to eliminate all reactionary public discourse that is usually associated with religious elements. In particular, the notion of a lay state has permeated several disputed spaces, for example, in the realm of public education and public health services. The sustainers of this myth tend to consider all public recurrence of religion as a step backwards and as a challenge to the idea of Argentina as a modern and democratic state. However, both myths tend to overlook important changes in religious identifications, particularly the increasing disidentification of the population with Catholicism and its impact on Argentine politics and culture. Although Argentina has been characterized as a “predominantly Catholic country” (PEW Research Center, 2014), quantitative studies have identified a loss in the number of Catholics, particularly during the last two decades, due to two major trends: a sustained growth in the percentage of Protestants, most of them evangelicals, and a rise in the number of “people without any religious identification”, “unaffiliated” or nonreligious (Somma et al., 2017). In 2008, the National Religious Belief and Attitude Survey reported 76.5% of Catholics and 11.3% of unaffiliated or nonreligious; in 2019, Catholics dropped to 62.9% and the nonreligious showed an increase of 18.9% (Mallimaci et  al., 2019). The rise of nonreligious identity is a novel trend for Argentine society. Although there is no consensus on their denomination, the category “unaffiliated” includes a very heterogeneous population: atheists, agnostics, spiritual seekers, unaffiliated believers and indifferent toward religion, among others (Esquivel, 2013; Rabbia, 2017). In general, the unaffiliated—just as with several of the new Protestants— came from Catholic backgrounds. Most of them were baptized by the Catholic rite. Some of the unaffiliated believe in God and display spiritual and religious practices which are remarkably similar to those of “disaffiliated” Catholics. In that sense, the conceptual boundaries that distinguish people with a religious affiliation from those without it seem to be porous and mobile in Argentina. But changes did not only happen in religious and nonreligious identifications. Studies have indicated several transformations in people’s lived religion and their social attitudes. Diversification and individualization of religious beliefs and practices are currently major trends in Argentine society (Rabbia et al., 2019). Most Catholics highly value individual autonomy, are infrequent churchgoers, and may be better identified as “cultural” or “nominal” Catholics. They are part of a diffused religious culture, with

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little obedience to institutional mandates (Mallimaci, 2015; Mallimaci & Giménez Béliveau, 2007; Gimenez Beliveau et al., 2013). At the same time, there is a process of an increasing liberalization of social attitudes: Catholics are becoming more and more progressive than the ecclesiastical hierarchies, especially on issues such as the legalization of abortion, sex education, and same-sex marriage. At least 80% of Catholics agree to guarantee legal abortion in some cases, such as when pregnancy is product of rape (Rabbia & Sgró Ruata, 2014), and 61% accept that same-sex couples may adopt children (Mallimaci et  al., 2019). Thus, Catholic believers are (in spite of the Catholic nation myth) a highly heterogeneous community when considering sexual practices and attitudes. But this internal diversity is usually less visible than are the minority groups considered “dogmatics” (5% of Catholics) in terms of their closed adherence to institutional doctrine on sexuality (Giménez Béliveau & Irrazabal, 2010). The unaffiliated tend to be more progressive on sexual issues than people with a religious identification. For example, almost 60% of unaffiliated people thought that women must have access to legal and safe abortion in any case, and 85% agreed with adoptions by same-sex couples (Mallimaci et al., 2019). In fact, people’s disagreements with religious dogmas and official postulates on sexuality are often cited as one of the main reasons for their religious distancing or disidentification (Johnson, 2018). Religious and nonreligious become, then, a complex cleavage, particularly when including sexuality as a dimension. Religious and nonreligious identities do not necessarily appear confrontational (as both myths tend to reinforce) but rather can coincide in the support of sexual and reproductive rights (Vaggione & Jones, 2015). Precisely, as analyzed in the rest of this chapter, contemporary activism has been able to mobilize what we refer to as “religious-nonreligious” imaginaries in support of abortion legalization. This activism not only politicizes a new imaginary on the religious and nonreligious cleavages but, in doing so, creates new political subjectivities.

Apostasy: The Politics of Disidentification The Collective Apostasy campaign (Campaña de Apostasía Colectiva) started in Argentina in 2009 as a transnationally articulated response against the veto of President Tabaré Vásquez to the law that decriminalized abortion in Uruguay. The campaign was launched by feminist

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activists through the mailing list of Argentina Women’s Information Network (RIMA, by its initial in Spanish) and accompanied by several atheists, humanists, free-thinkers, feminists, and sexual diversity organizations and activists (Mansilla, 2009, January 9). From its beginnings, the campaign slogan, “Not in my name” (No en mi nombre), made it clear that the central objective is to question the social representation that the Roman Catholic Church attributes to itself in various public debates, especially around moral and sexual topics. The campaign targets an important segment of Argentine society that has been baptized but does not practice religion and has stopped believing, or simply does not agree with the dogmas or feels rejected by the positions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. For this reason, they are invited to apostatize and to request the deletion of their personal baptismal records. The act of apostasy is framed by the campaign as a personal right based in civil law (personal data protection) and rights granted by the National Constitution, that goes beyond Catholic Canonical Laws. But it is also considered as a political act, as a public and symbolic expression against the self-attributed representativeness of the Roman Catholic Church. To carry out its objectives, the campaign has several strategies. First, it provides information, advice, and accompaniment to those who decide to complete the process of Catholic apostasy. In fact, the campaign website and social networks offer information about the act of apostatizing and the reasons that justify its practice, sample letters to carry out the process, as well as a set of witty potential answers to “frequent Catholic insults” in case people who want to apostate suffer any kind of harassment in their community (Apostasia.com.ar, n.d.). Second, the campaign also calls for collective demonstrations in cities across the country in order to make visible the increasing distance between people’s practices and attitudes from those promoted by the Catholic Church. Because the purpose is not only the individual act of apostasy, these public demonstrations are central in order to confront and erode the role of the Church’s hierarchy to position itself as representing a massive majority of religious people in the country. It is possible to identify two moments in the campaign. The first one coincides with the series of calls for collective apostasy carried out between March 2009 and December 2010 when demonstrations were held in several cities, such as Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Mendoza, in front of their parishes or archbishop’s headquarters. These calls were inspired by similar campaigns carried out previously in Spain and Germany. During this first

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moment, the campaign expressed its support for the equal marriage bill that was finally passed in July 2010 and publicly criticized the opposition of the Catholic Church to several sexual rights initiatives (Espacio Apostasía Colectiva, 2010, July 30). The second moment occurred in the context of the public debates on the legal abortion bill in 2018. This moment started in a less organized way, as an expression of discontent from the bottom up. As several activists received numerous individual inquiries about how to carry out the process and how to transform that experience into demonstrations, they began to organize collective apostasies in several cities across the country, including small towns. This second instance had a greater media and social repercussion that enabled the mobilization of an extensive network of new activists throughout all regions in the country. It is important to highlight the symbolic importance of publicizing challenges to the Catholic Church in small towns where Catholicism is deeply rooted and, in many cases, where legislators who opposed the bill live. An important difference between the first and second moment is that the messages and statements were fine-tuned for a wider potential audience. According to several activists, in this moment spokespersons emphasized more the dealignment between people’s own beliefs—religious or nonreligious—and those of the Catholic hierarchy, than the criticism toward religion. Even if the campaign seems to have had greatest initial reverberation among atheists and agnostics, it always targeted those who had been baptized as Catholic but who no longer feel represented by the Catholic hierarchies’ positions. The perception of a wider and more inclusive position may have helped more people, especially in small towns, to join the initiative. In sum, the Collective Apostasy campaign acquired, during this second moment, stronger social and political repercussions as a result of the sustained work of independent secular activists and groups, and a broader and more inclusive inquiry to its potential audience. These opportunities were opened by the debates on legal abortion and the need to resist the pressures, lobbies, and actions of the Catholic Church hierarchy during this time.3 Apostasy as a political standpoint has not only produced certain impacts on the public sphere (by making visible the voice of many unaffiliated or critical 3  It is important to consider that between the first and second moment, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (from Buenos Aires) became Pope Francis.

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Catholics) but also within the Catholic Church hierarchy. For example, as the campaign gained more public resonance, in turn, some dioceses began to demand new conditions to complete the apostasy process. At the end of 2018, the president of the National Episcopal Conference recognized that “enabling” the debate about legal abortion have caused them several troubles, including manifestations of dissidence in their own institutions (such as catholic schools) and the “apostasy phenomenon” (Agenzia Fides, 2018 November 6). In some cases, apostatizing has become a way to militate for state-­ church separation. Apostates are often also members of several online communities (there are at least 26 identifiable local groups of Apostasía Colectiva on Facebook), where they narrate their experiences and denounce the obstructions and delays of various dioceses in responding to their requests. They also continue to share information about the interference of the Catholic Church in public policies and have partaken in actions such as demanding the “cleansing” of religious symbols from public buildings or supporting demands against religious teaching in some public schools (ElTucumano.com, 2018, September 19). Most of those activists were also actively involved in demonstrations and social media actions during the parliamentary debates for the legalization of abortion in 2020. The impact of this campaign is to produce and circulate a new political subjectivity. By mobilizing the disidentification from religion as a political standpoint, the “apostate” is inscribed as an actor in need of a public voice and political representation. Apostasy is understood by Canon Law not only as a serious sin but also, in some cases, as a crime against religion and the unity of the Catholic Church (Corral Salvador and Urteaga Embril, 2000), and at the same time, it may imply social rejection in some conservative contexts. By transforming apostasy into a political act, apostates resignify their identification as a positive and proactive expression of social discontent.4 Some people have begun to identify themselves as “apostates” in public demonstrations, op-ed articles, interviews, and social media. Even social leaders such as Nora Cortiñas (from Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Founding Line) or well-known actresses

4  Some interviewees have emphasized the cathartic act of fulfilling the apostasy requirements and requesting the removal of baptismal records, even when they have not yet received a favorable response to their application by the Church.

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have made public their option to apostatize (Carballo, 2018, December 7; Santoro, 2018, September, 16).

CDD: The Politics of Dissidence The other mobilization of the religious-nonreligious imaginaries during the abortion debate was carried out by the organization Catholics for Choice (CDD for its Spanish acronym).5 Since its creation in 1993, CDD-­ Argentina has been a leading feminist group, having a central role in the formation of the National Campaign for Legal, Safe and Free Abortion which presented the 2018 draft legislative bill on abortion legalization. What characterizes CDD activism is the fight for feminist demands by reclaiming a Catholic identity. Although in alignment with the most progressive catholic currents, such as liberation theology, CDD includes a gender perspective to reconstructing the heteropatriarchal matrix of current Catholicism. The main mission of CDD-Argentina is to “promote women’s rights from an ethical, theological, catholic and feminist standpoint” (Catolicas. org.ar, n.d.). In a country where the myth of the catholic nation has shaped the culture, the mobilization of catholic feminist identities become an important political capital. This is particularly so when considering sexuality and reproduction, topics on which catholic morality has been a determining legal influence (Vaggione, 2018). Instead of privatizing religious identities, a general tendency among the feminist movement, CDD brings their complexity and plurality to the forefront of abortion debates, rendering visible the internal tensions and disagreements within Catholicism. What is supposed to be a paradox, the existence of Catholic women who support abortion for themselves and for others, becomes a central political subjectivity that this organization advances.6 CDD critically confronts the imaginary of Catholic identity as being anti-abortion through different strategies and campaigns such as the 5  Currently, there are CDD, with different levels of formalizations, in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, México, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Perú y Ecuador. Though these CDDs recognize their links among them and with the existing one in the USA (the first one to be created in 1973) they operate as autonomous NGOs. 6  For example, one of CDD campaigns is called “I’m Catholic. I decide with freedom” (Soy Católica. Decido en Libertad) which provide graphic products to share in social networks with claims like: “Neither my family, nor my partner, nor the Church, nor morals decide for me” (Catolicas.org.ar, n.d.).

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participation in public hearings, the publication of different materials, the organization of courses and seminars, parliamentary lobbying, and the strategic use of the judicial power.7 Although CDD activism is done at the national level, particularly lobby at the Parliament where CDD has had an important voice during the 2018 abortion debate, it also focused on those provinces with the highest Catholic influences that are located at the center and north of the country. One of the main purposes of CDD public interventions is to make visible the complex and plural ways in which women and men identify with Catholicism. Through the circulation of surveys, interviews, or even testimonies, CDD disseminate information regarding the increasing number of Catholics who do not agree with the positions of the hierarchy on many topics, such as abortion, sex education, anticonception, or euthanasia (Jhonson, 2018). During the abortion parliamentary debate, many members of the organizations brought the voices of catholic women in order to support abortion legalization. In contrast with the rigid position of the institutional hierarchy, many sectors have made their religious identity compatible with positions favorable to feminist and sexual diversity agenda, aiming to impact their religious communities and society at large (Bosio et al., 2018). Another connected mission of CDD activism is the production and circulation of arguments in favor of abortion from a Catholic perspective. While some feminist and sexual diversity movements tend to denounce religious or moral arguments as irremediably oppressive, groups like CDD intervene by presenting re-readings and deconstructions of these arguments.8 The feminist theologies are a crucial input for the organization because they overcome the heteropatriarchal components of religious traditions and confront the power of hierarchy to determine the moral contents. For CDD, these theologies are relevant in public arguments, whether to antagonize the patriarchal hierarchy, to defend abortion as an ethical choice, or to empower Catholic women. CDD mobilizes religious identities differently to the Apostasy campaign: instead of exiting religion, CDD proposes a dissident identification 7  In the organization website, there is detailed account of their activities: http://catolicas. org.ar/nuestro-trabajo/ 8  In the webpage of the CDD-Argentina and of the Red Latinoamericana de Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir is possible to find different publications related to feminist theologies. www.catolicasporelderechoadecidir.net

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within Catholicism. Dissent is more than mere disagreement; it is the breaking of a pretend unanimity that locates those dissenting as suspects, infiltrators, and subjects that face the tendency of expulsion. Rather than distancing themselves from traditional religions as a prerequisite to combat heteropatriarchy, CDD mission finds the basis for mobilization in the reaffirmation of their religious identity. The politicization of the religious internal diversity and the debates around feminist theologies as a resource to confront Roman Catholic hierarchies and dogmatism have a subversive potential. In sum, the mobilization of religious identities to advocate for state secularization and reproductive rights also implies a commitment to challenge and transform the socially expanded conception of what being religious is, in particular being Catholic.

Conclusions In a relatively short period of time, Argentina debated and reformed the legislation on sexuality and reproduction by targeting the political and cultural influence of Catholicism. This chapter focused on abortion, the most resisted topic by Catholic hierarchy, aiming to show the complex and diverse ways in which religious and nonreligious imaginaries are mobilized. Our analysis emphasized 2018 as an effervescent moment of re-­ articulation of religious and nonreligious imaginaries by the Collective Apostasy campaign and CDD-Argentina. Most of their ideas, demands, and mobilizations also resonated during 2020 when National Congress finally passed the bill of legal abortion. On the one hand, the Collective Apostasy campaign interpellates the heterogeneous category of those who do not have a religious identification and/or feel rejected by the Catholic Church. Although the Campaign initially had greatest resonance among atheists and agnostics, during its decade of ongoing activism it has impacted a wider audience: those who have been baptized but do not feel represented by the Catholic hierarchy on sexual morality. The campaign mobilized nonreligious identity as a political (and ethical) standpoint for public debates, recuperating elements of an anticlerical tradition in the country’s secular movement and the growing social discontent toward the Catholic Church. On the other hand, CDD-Argentina targets the heterogeneity within the religious; particularly, the important number of persons who harmonize their Catholic identification with a position in favor of legal abortion. Unlike the Collective Apostasy campaign, which seeks to politicize

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religious disidentification, CDD mobilize a dissident form of identification disputing the power of the hierarchy to set the boundaries of what being Catholic means. In doing so, CDD aims to channel and represent the numerous Catholics who support sexual and reproductive rights. The mobilizations of these under-represented positions allow for the emergence of new political subjectivities challenging traditional imaginaries about the religious and nonreligious in the country. Apostates and dissident Catholics show the subversive potential of individual acts as the source for performative collective actions of social discontent; both coincide in the centrality of sexual and reproductive rights and in the need for a stronger state secularism to guarantee them. Even if they differ, both mobilizations work with the shreds of the Catholic nation myth: diverse segments of the population that comes from Catholicism, uncomfortable with religious mandates over sexuality and with the legitimization of the ecclesiastical hierarchies in public decisions. In a context like Argentina, feminist activism acts to incite moments where implicit social understandings of the religious and nonreligious are configurated and reconsidered. They also open opportunities for the social recognition of new secular subjectivities which do not necessarily put aside religious beliefs and identifications but relocate them in a context of (non) religious diversity and personal autonomy. Sexuality, or the need to free oneself from strict moral codes, is determinant not only in the main changes about the religious and nonreligious imaginaries but also in their politicizations.

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Vaggione, J.  M. (2005). Reactive Politicization and Religious Dissidence: The Political Mutations of the Religious. Social Theory and Practice, 31(2), 233–255. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract200531210 Vaggione, J. M., & Jones, D. (2015). La política sexual y las creencias religiosas: el debate por el matrimonio para las parejas del mismo sexo (Argentina, 2010). Revista de Estudios Sociales, 51, 105-117, h ­ttp://dx.doi.org/10.7440/ res51.2015.08 Vaggione, J. M. (2018). Sexuality, Law, and Religion in Latin America: Frameworks in Tension. Religion and Gender, 8(1), 14–31. Vives, J.  M. (2018). Religious Freedom without Equality? Religious Minorities and the Establishment of Religion in Argentina. Journal of Law and Religion, 33(2), 172–191. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2018.32 Zanatta, L. (1999). Perón y el mito de la nación católica. Iglesia y Ejército en los orígenes del peronismo (1943–1946). Sudamericana.

PART III

Positive Content

CHAPTER 6

Cultural Creatives: Embodiment of a Transmodern Vision Julia Itel

Abstract  This chapter aims to understand how the nonreligious spirituality of cultural creatives, who feel the urgency of creating a more sustainable and viable society, is expressed in a repertoire of concrete and daily actions. This growing alternative tendency in modern post-industrial societies is centered around postmaterialist values. No longer believing in the modern myth of progress and refusing to participate in an ecocide model, cultural creatives are aware of the finiteness of the world and the limits of modernity. They seek to develop ways of living that respect the individual, the community, and the environment through pragmatic and daily actions. After presenting the concept of an “ending era”, I will demonstrate what alternative visions cultural creatives adhere to and apply in order to concretize the transmodern utopia. Finally, I will define how spirituality in its “human-ethical” form enables cultural creatives to be congruent and to build a better future.

J. Itel (*) Freiburg University, Freiburg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_6

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Keywords  Cultural creatives • Transmodernity • Eco-spirituality • Alternative discourse This chapter aims to understand how the nonreligious spirituality of cultural creatives, who feel the urgency of creating a more sustainable and viable society, is expressed in a repertoire of concrete and daily actions. In fact, the nonreligious imaginary of these individuals can only be fully understood through the observation of specific practices that seek to put this worldview both individually and/or collectively into action. This growing alternative tendency—identified by researchers Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson (Ray & Anderson, 2000)—in modern post-industrial societies is centered around postmaterialist values. No longer believing in the modern myth of progress and refusing to participate in an ecocide model, cultural creatives are aware of the finiteness of the world and the limits of modernity. They seek to develop ways of living that respect the individual, the community, and the environment through pragmatic and daily actions. As such, they embody a new ethics based on an ecosophical paradigm that places life at its core. After presenting the concept of an “ending era”, I will demonstrate what alternative visions cultural creatives adhere to and apply in order to concretize the transmodern utopia. Finally, I will define how spirituality sustains the emergence of this new ethics and how it enables cultural creatives to be congruent and to concretely build a better future. The data discussed in this chapter comes from research I conducted in both Quebec and France (Itel, 2019) with 19 cultural creatives who considered themselves “spiritual but not religious”. In this study, I sought to understand the role of secular spirituality in the creation of a more sustainable society. Cultural creatives were recruited through a purposive sampling method retaining certain selection criteria, and were selected with an online survey designed to see if they matched the cultural creatives’ profile. Nineteen participants out of 23 were recruited and then interviewed in a semi-directed way. Of course, the anonymity of the participants was preserved.

The Social Tendency of Cultural Creatives and Its Central Narratives The emergence of cultural creatives was first identified in the mid-1980s by two American researchers, Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson (2000). Their sociological survey of 100,000 Americans over a period of 13 years

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showed that in 1999, 26% (then 35% in 2008) of the US population were adhering to postmaterialist values centered on individual autonomy, self-­ expression, the quest for well-being, gender equality, social implication, and a better relationship with nature. This tendency differs from the more classical ideologies of American society such as modernism (i.e. materialist vision, belief in technical progress, social success, individualism) or traditionalism, marked by cultural and religious conservatism. Seven years later, a French study (Association pour la Biodiversité culturelle, 2007) was conducted in order to assess the proportion of cultural creatives in France. The study found that, at the time, the group reached nearly 38% of the total population. Both of those studies, although carried out in different cultural contexts, illustrate the emergence of an alternative dynamic in several Western societies—positioning itself as a third way, between tradition and modernity. This third way retains the “positive” aspects of these two paradigms, while cutting ties with those considered as excessive, such as institutional religious authority or the modern mechanistic vision of the world (rationalist authority). Originating in the nineteenth-­ century Romantic and Transcendentalism movements, this awareness spread into the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and the social justice movements happening at the time (feminism, environmental, pacifism, social rights and recognition of marginalized minorities, etc.). Postmaterialist values then spread on a large scale, triggering a “silent [cultural] revolution” within Western modern society (Inglehart, 1977), which then entered into a more reflexive phase (Beck, 2001; Giddens, 1991). Indeed, since the second half of the twentieth century, the majority of Western post-industrial societies have been affected by a general loss of adherence to the narratives that founded the modern project. According to the theory of ultramodernity developed by Yves Lambert (2000) and then by Jean-Paul Willaime (2008), modernity is going through its own secularization process. Thus, one would witness a demythologization of modernity which would tend “to relativize its own utopias” (Willaime, 2008, 16). Among these, the utilitarian vision of nature based on a major opposition between the natural and the social (Larrère & Larrère, 2018) would tend to fade in favor of a new conception of nature, in which humanity would be part of it. During the 1970s and 1980s, awareness of the ecological emergency gradually rose with many ecological disasters around the world (such as the Chernobyl crisis in April 1986) and the

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entry into the Anthropocene era.1 The realization of the finitude of the world transforms the relationship that human beings maintain with their environment and “contributes to gradually erecting Nature as a rare value (in the economic sense of the term) and as sacred (in the religious sense of the term)” (Liogier, 2018, 460–461). This therefore leads to the fundamental awareness that it is necessary to “administer an economy of nature” both in political and in relational terms to care for the living. Driven by humanist ideals and eager to make society evolve toward a collective well-­ being, cultural creatives are thus particularly sensitive to the ecological question. The recent need to shift to collectively sustainable behaviors is revealing of this quest for responsibility (Aspe & Jacqué, 2012) and makes the adoption of a new moral pact between human beings and nature more relevant than ever.

The End of an Era Cultural creatives constitute an alternative discourse largely based on the end of adherence to the modern narrative and the implementation of initiatives in response to a desire of sustainable emancipation from the Western neoliberal system. This discourse must therefore be understood as both awareness and pragmatic action, characteristic of specific lifestyles and maintaining a critical distance from society. As a result, the alternative discourse becomes, in this instance, ethically engaged. Cultural creatives, because of their ideals and values, intend to lay the foundations of a circular society. End of the Modern Myth When asked what their current view of society was, cultural creatives made a fairly critical description of Western consumer culture characterized by the values of money, competition, individualism, inequality, exclusion, patriarchy, and labor (as opposed to work). Carole (69, French) summarizes:

1  From the Greek anthropos, “human being”, and kainos, “new, recent”, defined in 2000 by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer as the era marked by human activities’ influence on the planet and the awareness of humanity as a “global, real, physical force, cause of climate change, responsible for the transition to a new era” (Larrère, 2015, 47).

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[I see the current society] as a great chaos, where I find that there is no respect for the other. I think it is a very selfish society and very profit-­ oriented, to the detriment of human values.

In fact, their judgment rests on a critique of hypermodernity, that is, modernity in all its excesses (Aubert, 2006). According to Corinne (42, French): I get the sensation of not knowing where society is going but it is not in the right direction because everything becomes excessive, whether in people, societies, pollution, prices.

Claudine (56, French) states that in our western societies, we have turned away too much from essential values and today we are told too much about profitability, profits and the fact of denying all the human element. It grieves me a lot. And this side of domination, power, I don’t like it. […] when I see what is happening in the work sphere where more and more people burn out, we ask them too much, always more for profit.

This “selfish” society, antonymous to humanist values, is inherently obstructing and impeding the well-being of humans, animals, and the environment. Nature is thus considered as a means to an end, something to possess and exploit. As described by participants, this dehumanized society, embedding an unsustainable system, would lead humanity to its loss. It is the participants’ understanding that hypermodernity leads to lesser biodiversity, alienation, and a broader loss of meaning and landmarks. Despite the achievements of modernity (material comfort, emancipation of the individual, and considerable improvement of health and living conditions), this system based on issues of the twentieth century is not, for many, suited to the challenges of the twenty-first century. According to Frédéric (38, Quebecois): We are in a period where we have not yet invented ways of being in the world that correspond to the problems we have. We have 20th-century ­solutions to solve problems that are truly 21st-century. But the solutions are not really invented, or else they are invented but are not yet integrated into society. Which means that we are still managing something as if it were linear processes, we are still trying to manage societies with understandings that

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date back from the 18th century and the 20th century (such as Taylorism, the invisible hand of the market, etc.). […] [This competitive model] creates all kinds of drifts in the system which means that we are always sacrificing resilience, adaptability at the cost of efficiency. So, the system can only create human crises.

The end of trust and belief in our current system, encompassing politics, finance, and the media, is widely evoked. As with Adrien (35, French), a great number of the people interviewed said that they had “dropped out” in one way of this society, because they no longer identified themselves with its values and vision: I am not someone involved in society. I really dropped out of society. I have a TV at home but it’s only for playing video games or watching movies. I think it’s been 10 years since I stopped watching TV or listening to the radio. So, I don’t keep up with what’s going on. Anyway, if something important happens, people will tell me about it. I am not interested in the products of society because I do not identify with it, I do not find myself in it, and I always felt uncomfortable.

In this frantic and incessant rhythm that denies human beings’ right to well-being (postmaterialist culture), our society has become more “fictitious” and “unreal” (according to Mélanie, 31, Belgian) than ever before. It would seem, through the statements above illustrating a profound questioning of the current system, that cultural creatives contribute to a demythologization of the modern paradigm and the end of adherence to its postulates and meta-narratives. Paradigm Shift and Transmodern Society Cultural creatives see the current time as a period of change, a turning point where humanity evolves toward a phase of “maturation”. For example, Clara (42, French) tells that “[society] is changing. The benchmarks of society based on the old values of hyper consumption, excessive capitalism, etc. are declining. We feel that a world is changing”. Or, Olivier (44, Quebecois), “I see current society as a teenager growing up sideways, who is in a big period of change. It’s a transitional period where humanity gains maturity”. This phase of change corresponds to the ecological and social transition movements in modern societies. This transition is highlighted

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by an awakening of awareness among population for better food, for promoting short and local distribution systems, but also in the increasing demand for a better-being, which translates to a sharp increase in professions related to alternative therapies. The need for more ecological and therapeutic consciousness emanates for cultural creatives mainly from this crucial need of meaning in a “dehumanized” society. As Clara illustrates, [t]here is an awareness of current society, where there are many of us who are more and more impacted by this concern of consuming better, eating better. In addition, there are more and more therapists. It is not for nothing. And people no longer turn themselves to leaders of traditional medicine. People have demands for wellness.

Finally, while many of cultural creatives have a realistic view of our current situation, they widely remain confident in the future of society. As Millie (23, French) states, “I think more and more people are awakening. Therefore, I feel confident. I see the current society and I say ‘wow, there are lots of possibilities and there are lots of things to do’”. They are actively looking for alternatives to build a new society.

Alternative Visions for a Better Future A “culture of actions” or the Politics of Small Steps Guided by the imperative of responsibility, a “culture of actions” is actively being set up by developing initiatives of commitment to live in a society that places the human and nature at its heart. Cultural creatives choose to be in action—thus implying an ethical and committed stance—rather than remaining in the posture of the average middle-class consumer who— according to Arthur (24, French)—“passively undergoes the excesses of a sick society”. In this context, consumption is one way of defending one’s ideals and values by choosing high-quality products (organic, local), eating less meat, repairing rather than redeeming objects, and so on. In French, the term “consom’action” (contraction of “consumption” and “action”) refers to this idea of ethical and civic consumption. For example, Clara says: Well I do what I can. I try at my level to evolve myself and to respect the environment by sorting my waste, trying to pollute less on certain things, to

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buy less things from abroad (to limit pollution). In my daily consumption, I pay attention, […] I try to go directly towards peasants and the sources of production. I just try at my level to make a difference.

Another example is Frédéric, who says that he is “in a process of material simplicity”, in which he tries “to make conscious, coherent, and more ecological choices possible”. Repairing Society A transmodern culture is gradually growing in parallel to the consumer society. Transmodernity is perhaps the new utopia of the twenty-first century. In our case, utopia is understood in the sense popularized by Pierre Rabhi, a French philosopher and agroecologist, for whom it is necessary to embody utopia. Transmodernity would therefore decondition us, challenge our ideas and habits, and drive us to “a change-triggering transgression” of the norms (André et  al., 2013, 75). In this way, utopia would serve as a vision and as a new direction for humanity, with the aim of (1) repairing the social fabric and (2) creating a sustainable economy, as illustrated by Nadia (49, Montreal): I have a role to play in repairing [the social fabric] and I must make sure to repair my fabric that formed me as an individual. It’s my responsibility because I [must be] able to fix as much as I repaired. I think there are plenty of people like me who have to repair this fabric. Each in his own way.

But how does this ideal translate into realistic and achievable actions in reality? The answer of cultural creatives is to adopt a politics of small steps (ex: consom’action, zero waste movement, etc.), by being both coherent and bold, and to make the congruence between values and acts a constant discipline in order to become fully ethical citizens and “participate in collective well-being”, as Gabriel (30, French) says. Regarding social fabric reparation, the most important values to cultural creatives are humanistic and ethical (e.g. kindness, tolerance, cooperation, mutual aid, equity, sharing, love, social justice). According to Carole, “an ideal society would be a society where people respect each other, help each other, [and where there is a] more harmonious relationship between people”. They are the cornerstones of a fairest and

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more egalitarian society in which humanity could finally live collectively. Among these values, the main one was undoubtedly that of respect, but implying three dimensions: self-respect, respect of others, and respect of nature. As Frédéric illustrates: “I would like to see people who are more in touch with themselves and then with people, society, nature. It would then enable them to make more coherent, more courageous choices too”.

An Ecosophical Conscience A Sustainable Model The creation of a sustainable model seemed fundamental for the survival of humanity and therefore was a priority for many cultural creatives. Within the group, “sustainable” is once more defined through three aspects: being sustainable for oneself (respectful of the mental and physical health of the individual); for others (ethical vision and respectful of people’s fundamental rights); and for the environment (protection and care for nature). For instance, Millie defines this new vision as follows: I started to be more intentional. In fact, for me, I started taking responsibility for all of my choices and realizing that everything I do has an impact. Every action every day. So, the way I consume is a way of acting for the society I want. […] An ideal society would be a society where people are empowered and practice being in alignment with their values and achieving their interconnection with each other and with their environment.

This sustainability model therefore implies a harmonious coexistence between humanity and its environment. It is a “set of values that stand together” (Frédéric). Taking into account these three levels of interdependence is a fundamental characteristic of cultural creatives’ global vision, based on the concept of ecosophy. Integrating Ecosophy: The Role of Spirituality Frédéric defines spirituality as a way “to integrate wisdom, to connect, to integrate the principles that allow us to understand ourselves, to

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understand our relationship with ourselves, with others, with the world”. Spirituality is therefore conceptualized as a philosophy of life, guided by responsible actions toward the protection of nature. In my master’s thesis, I proposed a new typology called “human-ethical conscience” that corresponds to an ecological spirituality directed toward an ethical concretization, by integrating a psychological dimension of work on oneself and humanism, and the vision of a re-enchanted nature. Arthur’s spirituality is defined as follows: Spirituality helps me to protect, to be more respectful of nature, more respectful of life and to be aware of the luck we have because we do not know if life exists after death. It helps me to be more understanding, to accept my choices. I really feel in agreement with my values and my principles and it helps me to follow a direction that makes sense to me.

Like Millie for whom “it’s much easier to connect with [her] spirituality when [she is] in the wild because it’s such a source of wonder that it’s easier for [her]”, spirituality provides a base through which cultural creatives experience the interconnection of the living. For Annick (54, Quebecoise), “that which is alive is very intelligent. And my mind is connected to this intelligence of the living as such”. To experience nature, through spirituality, means living fully the principle of unicity that governs ecosophy. Going further than the environmental ethics that was first built to challenge the anthropocentric certainty that nature is at our disposal, ecosophy proposes a new alliance between the individual, the social, and the ecological in the establishment of a natural contract (Serres, 1990) and thus ensuring respect for life. Ecosophy thus represents a new ecological paradigm (Maffesoli, 2017), based on relational ecology and structuring the narrative of transmodernity. From the perspective in which “the idea of finiteness of the modern project makes its way in the perspective of moving towards a new alliance with nature” (Corneloup, 2011, 3), transmodernity would therefore be a new societal project going further and transcending late modernity.

Conclusion The nonreligiosity of cultural creatives is expressed primarily by a loss of adherence to the dogmatic imaginary, whether political (the dominant capitalist narrative) or metaphysical (“traditional” religion). No longer

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recognizing themselves in a world which does not respect the living, cultural creatives are implementing new ways of living in the world through daily practice. Thus, nonreligiosity is expressed in these individuals by a spiritual imaginary that resembles a pragmatic ethics, embodied at both an individual and a political level. While seeking ways to improve society to make it more sustainable humanely and ecologically, cultural creatives build one step at a time the transmodern project. If for Charles Taylor (2004), the modern moral order consisted in developing an ethics of freedom and mutual benefit (i.e. an alliance and a recognition of the rights and freedoms of all human beings as equal), in the current phase of modernity, it would seem appropriate to develop an ethics assuring the rights and duties of individuals toward nature. This shift occurs through social and political innovations aimed at not only integrating the precautionary principle into the state decision-making process but also redefining or even replacing the existing structures. In that sense, spirituality is essential in guiding people toward a philosophy of life that rewards pragmatic action.

References André, C., et al. (2013). Se changer, changer le monde. L’Iconoclaste. Aspe, C., & Jacqué, M. (2012). Environnement et société. Éditions Quae. Association pour la Biodiversité Culturelle. (2007). Les créatifs culturels en France. Yves Michel. Aubert, N. (2006). L’individu hypermoderne. Éditions Eres. Beck, U. (2001). La société du risque: sur la voie d’une autre modernité. Aubier. Corneloup, J. (2011). La forme transmoderne des pratiques récréatives de nature. Développement durable et territoires, 2(3), 1–22. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity. Inglehart, R. (1977). The Silent Revolution. Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton University Press. Itel, J. (2019). Spiritualité et société durable. Yves Michel. Lambert, Y. (2000). Religion, modernité, ultramodernité: Une analyse en terme de “tournant axial”. Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 109, 87–116. Larrère, C. (2015). Anthropocène: le nouveau grand récit. Esprit, 12, 46–55. Larrère, C., & Larrère, R. (2018). Penser et agir avec la nature. Une enquête philosophique. La Découverte/Poche. Liogier, R. (2018). Le sens de la nature. Comment la nature est devenue surnaturelle. Études théologiques et religieuses, 93(3), 451–467.

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Maffesoli, M. (2017). Écosophie. Une écologie pour notre temps. Cerf. Ray, P., & Anderson, S. (2000). The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. Three Rivers Press. Serres, M. (1990). Le contrat naturel. François Bourin. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Puke University Press. Willaime, J.-P. (2008). Le retour du religieux dans la sphère publique: vers une laïcité de reconnaissance et de dialogue. Olivétan.

CHAPTER 7

Reweaving Spheres: Towards an Ultimate Meaning of Practice Timothy Stacey

Abstract  It is often assumed that by definition the nonreligious do not have a sense of ultimate meaning. Conversely, this chapter shows that community organisers derive ultimate meaning from their struggle against the dehumanising impact of capitalism. Ultimate meaning is radically present in their lives—it’s just that it is not expressed in metaphysical terms. Rather, as one interlocutor put it, “I think these things come about through practice”. By framing them in these superlative terms, I suggest that these practices are indispensable components of my interlocutors’ identity. This has two consequences for those aiming to mobilise world repairing work: first, rather than only seeking a shared set of beliefs, values and issues, in some cases it may prove worthwhile to draw on a shared practice; and second, asking those on the frontline to compromise their practices in the interests of some greater “end” may lead to disillusionment and disaffection.

T. Stacey (*) Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_7

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Keywords  Nonreligion • Imaginaries • Ultimate meaning of practice • Community organizing • Vancouver

Introduction We are coming to the end of a Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA) Delegates’ Assembly in a packed St James’ Anglican Church in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, an area where the sidewalks are literally brimming with homeless people. The calls to action are over. Normally we’d now be treated to a well-choreographed cultural piece to close the event. But this time Trevor, a long-time member, invites Beth onto the stage. He begins telling the story of how he met Beth in an airport queue and how there and then she had brought him on board with MVA. I suddenly realise that this must be Beth’s retirement ceremony. Trevor tells of how without Beth, and without MVA, he never would have thought a unionist like him would be sat in a church, talking with a nun and having an important conversation about transit, as had happened tonight. Then Beth is asked to speak. “Wow”, she opens, “I never spoke from a pulpit before. [Pause] They brought me in to set up an IAF [Industrial Areas Foundation] in Vancouver. They were angry and helpless that such a wealthy city could have so much homelessness and poverty. One of our biggest problems was patience. People wanted to act. Why not just have a rally outside the art gallery? Never do for others what they can do for themselves. MVA offers you a chance to get to know and work with people you otherwise never would. Please take the opportunity. My best retirement present would be to see you thrive”. As she finishes her speech, there is a standing ovation. Many of us in the room are in tears. As we continue to clap, Beth turns to Jessica, her protégé, and hands her a gift: it is a framed artistic representation of MVA’s reason d’être and that of the many IAF-inspired organisations around the world: reweaving the fabric of civil society. It is an image of a rope. Each thread is a different colour, representing the way that IAF organisations bring together radically different institutions and individuals to work towards a common good. It is on the basis of this image that I want to offer my contribution. As stated in the introduction, the aim of this volume is twofold: to illuminate

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the positive content of nonreligious imaginaries by researching practices that are not obviously either religious or nonreligious and, in the process, to showcase tools from the study of religion for the broader social scientific study of world repairing work. My interlocutors operate in an imaginary in which communities were strong and tightly knit in the past, are frayed in the present, but can be rewoven for the future. This process of fraying and reweaving is complicated, but theories from the sociology of religion will help. The story begins with the process of differentiation or what in the West is more parochially known as the separation of church and state (Bruce, 2003; Casanova, 2007; Martin, 1993). In the course of Western modernity, institutions such as education, health, economics and politics slowly differentiated themselves from religion and became self-standing, autonomous spheres. It is supposed to be the case that as a result of this differentiation, each sphere remains ideologically neutral. Individuals can thus gain access to vital services without conforming to dominant beliefs. For this reason, compartmentalisation, the ability to distinguish between one’s own idea of what a good life consists of, on the one hand, and what must be publicly demanded of all people, on the other, is taken as a baseline of secular citizenship (Dobbelaere, 2011; Habermas, 1995, [1962] 2005, 2006, 2011). But what if these spheres aren’t separated out quite as neatly as we like to think? What if we’re already living under a kind of all-­ encompassing ideology? In recent years, scholars increasingly treat capitalism as such an ideology. Capitalism, they suggest, has creeped out of its separated domain and into other spheres of life. It is not only that people are judged in terms of their ability to contribute to the capitalist system and shamed when they fail to do so (Back, 2015; Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018; Skeggs, 2014). In addition, the logic of capital is seen to dominate political decision-­ making (Dinham, 2012), religious affiliation (McAlexander et al., 2014), the way we relate to other individuals (Sandel, 2013; Skeggs, 2014), what we choose to do with our leisure time (Skidelsky & Skidelsky, 2013) and even how and with whom we have sex (Mellor & Schilling, 1997). In response to this encroachment, a number of my interlocutors find themselves toying with ideas and practices that could challenge the ideology of capitalism from the ground up. Janey explains: When I started working with Chinatown Together, I was frustrated by how slowly everything developed. I’d be sitting down and having long conversa-

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tions with elderly women, and half the time I was, and still am, bringing them huge jugs of milk. We end up in conversations about their lives and rarely get to discussing politics or action. But then I came to realise that having strong non-instrumental relationships is an antithesis to capitalism. Not just forcing people to sign petitions. We should be building the microcosm of the kind of society we want to live in. That’s why I think it’s important not to be issue-based. In that process you can forget why you are fighting against a particular policy: because it interrupts social life. Now I feel like I'm constantly making new grandmas

What triggers Janey’s ethical self-reflection is the recognition that the separation of spheres has been contravened by capitalism itself, since its logics have infiltrated social and behavioural spheres, even influencing her own manner of organising. We might therefore consider her experiments with different ways of living as acts of “dedifferentiation”. I use the term dedifferentiation, following—most prominently but by no means exclusively—Habermas ([1962] 2005), Parsons (1968) and Calhoun (2004) to capture the attempt to reweave ultimate meaning with political and economic decision-making. As with the cultural creatives, Itel discusses in her contribution, my interlocutors regard the political and personal worlds as increasingly dominated by a capitalist ideology that disregards the inherent dignity of people and planet. It has left my interlocutors with a feeling of brokenness. It is in this sense that I see their work of reversing this trend as an instance of what Beaman (2017) and Woodhead (2016) have called ‘world repairing’. Yet what to do when you are yourself implicated in the spread? The participants in my research want to resist the spread of capitalist logics, and yet they find their own discourses and behaviours deeply imbued with these logics. They thus find themselves searching for something simultaneously higher, beyond, less tainted by instrumental logics, but also firmer, more concrete, less susceptible to flux. My interlocutors refuse to search for the answer in some new monolithic ideology to extoll from upon high. Instead, the answer arrives in the form of what I will call, following another interlocutor named Elaine, an ultimate meaning of practice, wherein individual people matter more than ideologies and issues. Stressing an ultimate meaning of practice speaks to both aims of this volume. To those interested in the imaginaries of the nonreligious, it emphasises that my interlocutors do indeed have an ultimate meaning, but that this is located in a practice. To try to articulate it

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in a set of propositional beliefs may be possible, but it might also detract from the crucial element. The fact that people see their practices as expressions of ultimate meaning has two consequences for those aiming to mobilise world repairing work: first, rather than only seeking a shared set of beliefs, values and issues, in some cases it may prove worthwhile to draw on a shared practice; and second, asking those on the frontline to compromise their practices in the interests of some greater “end” may lead to disillusionment and disaffection.

Methods The research for this paper took place during 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Vancouver, Canada, in which I explored the ethical imaginaries of community organisers “for whom religion is no more than a secondary concern”. As stated in the introduction, I use the term imaginaries to avoid system-conjuring terms like “worldviews” and to indicate the way that people imagine the past they have left behind, the present in which they are situated and the future into which they are headed. The activism was unrelated to matters of religion and instead focused on the environment, housing and access to healthcare. The point of this focus was to extend research into religion and nonreligion as performance away from attention to existential meaning systems and lifecycle events (Day, 2010; Lee, 2015; Manning, 2018) and towards questions of the things that people commit themselves to. Put simply, less about whether and how they are born and die and more about the ideas, causes, places and people that they want to bring to life or are unwilling to see die. The research was undertaken in three concentric ethnographic circles. A wider circle situates Vancouver geopolitically. It explores how Vancouver is shaped in relation to the vast and awe-inspiring nature, on the one hand, and increasing urban sprawl into that nature, on the other, and in terms of being a centre of resource-extractive liberal economics, on the one hand, and on the periphery of an unfinished colonial project of liberalisation, on the other. A middle circle explores the work of Metro Vancouver Alliance, which follows the Industrial Areas Foundation tradition of drawing together religious groups, academia, trade unions, community groups and small businesses in search of a common good. And the inner circle was devoted to what I call the friends project, where I spent time hanging out with 36 people involved with MVA for whom religion is no more than a

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secondary concern, allowing them to lead me to the causes they cared about, their favourite hangout spots and hobbies.

The Separation of Spheres in Vancouver Vancouver is a place in which capitalist logics find fertile ground. Vancouver is built on the unceded and stolen territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-waututh people. This land is a birthplace of a resource-­extractive capitalism that depletes the waterways and disembowels the land that indigenous people hold sacred. It is moreover a playing ground for global elite, who, inspired by the beauty of the landscape, are buying holiday homes and speculative property, making the city ever less affordable for even the settler middle class. Just like the indigenous people they and their forbears have displaced, the settler middle class is newly discovering that the separation of moral and economic spheres ultimately means the subordination of the moral and social to the logic of capital. At this point, the second impact of differentiation comes to the fore: the absence of a shared moral tradition from which to resist. Vancouver has a hugely diverse but largely ghettoised population, meaning people often organise around racial or sexual identities rather than around shared values or economic interests. And it has a huge turnover of population, meaning that there is an absence of organic trust rooted in shared tradition and social networks. A term I hear at almost every MVA event is “silos”. “We need to stop working in silos”, Kirsten tells a crowd at a training event. And then, with a playful smirk “did you know there are 19 organisations for protecting elephants in Victoria alone?” There is a chuckle across the room. She smiles. She has the room now. “I mean, it’s great that people want to help elephants, but wouldn’t it be even better if they worked together?” The inability to come together around common issues is often attributed to a lack of human touch. Like Janey, many of my interlocutors are dissatisfied with activist practice on account of its putting ideologies and issues before people. In philosophical terms, we might speak of this as the difference between a Kantian or Rawlsian deontological morality based on laws and an ethics of virtue rooted in the formation of good character and good relationships. Trevor, who I introduced earlier, is a long-time trade unionist. He explains that:

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People learn their solidarity in unions in a kind of rules way. “Don’t cross a picket line”, “never cross a pricket line”, it’s drilled into you, right? Solidarity, as important as it is, in the union movement is a bit … it lacks a kind of emotional quality or heart-felt quality that…human touch … I love the idea of a kind of, not a stateless society but sort of … the idea of errr … citizens doing the right thing not because of rules. I’ve always wondered, is it possible?

Like Janey, Trevor is seeking a more profound and personally transformative solidarity that enthuses how we relate to every individual we encounter, rather than a policy-driven solidarity, which he suggests is as dehumanising as the capitalism he is fighting. Those words, “is it possible?”, have reverberated in my head ever since that conversation. Trevor is so resistant to being falsely imputed with religious, spiritual or even poetic words that one can only detect profundity in his tone and cadence. The way he asks, “is it possible?”, seems to me a question laced with enchantment, that is, with awe and wonder about what kind of beings humans are and what kind of feats they might be capable. I am inspired by reading between Day (2013) and Beaman (2017) to call this  enchanted voice. When searching for ultimate meaning amongst people like Trevor for whom metaphysical language means so little, it is crucial to pay attention to when enchanted voice is employed.

Reweaving Spheres: Towards an Ultimate Meaning of Practice Vancouver is not all colonial capitalism. As a symbol of an unfinished colonial project, the city is also vibrant with utopian ideas and practices. The resurgence of indigenous culture has had a deep impact on those seeking alternatives to capitalist ideology. So too have new age forms of spirituality (Barman, 2008). Still, resistant as many of my participants are even to notions of spirituality, which seem to threaten their rational identity, none of these alternative ontological systems, at least as systems, seem to stick. It is in this context that an ultimate meaning of practice becomes so crucial. In the case of both Janey and Trevor, this is a practice of giving people one’s full respect and time irrespective of its benefit to a tangible goal. Izzie takes this idea to the extreme. She participates in a programme in which she shares a home with people who have a history of homelessness

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and drug addiction. She lives where her politics are. As with Janey and Trevor, this attachment to addressing social problems by forming relationships with suffering individuals seems to be coupled with an aspiration for a different world in which people look out for one another without the need for a state. When I ask her if she has an image of an ideal world in her head, she tells me: Where everyone in the city is like aware, engaged and involved. In civic movements. And participation. And therefore we don’t need a government to take care of us. The government slowly becomes obsolete.

Again, I hear enchantment. If only everyone shared in this same commitment to a practice, there would be no need for government. For Jessica, these personal commitments and political goals are directly linked. She asks me rhetorically how do you expect world peace if you can’t talk to your neighbour? How do you expect world peace if you treat your garbage man like shit? And so a lot of that, how I treat the world as it should be is, “how should I be?” And I think a lot of the work we do in the alliance is around that: really trying to change how we operate in the world. When we do a training, the whole thing is about trying to make people curious about somebody else. Because we’re actually trying to shake up the way that society makes us behave towards each other.

As the latter part of Jessica’s point indicates, the aim of MVA is not to deliver an ideology or a set of rules to participants but rather to cultivate in them the practice of curiosity. It is this practice that will shake up society. In the training sessions Jessica refers to, participants are taught how to have a “relational meeting”. These meetings are MVA’s way of reweaving the fabric of civil society, one relationship at a time. Relational meetings are taught and practised at every MVA event. They involve asking personal questions to people about their background and their passions without offering a clear agenda. They are designed to deliberately contrast with the professional meetings that most people are used to. Jessica will often tell stories of people who have “welled up [in tears]” during meetings in sheer surprise at someone in a professional context taking a genuine interest in their life.

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It is helpful here to invoke the term “prefigurative politics”, whereby the political means or strategy embodies and reflects a movement’s ultimate ends. This is to be contrasted with a realpolitik whereby the ends justify the means. Gordon (2018) has warned against the uncritical use of the term prefigurative, since it may lead to a focus on actions in the present without due regard for future sustainability and impact. Yet amongst my participants for whom ultimate meaning is discovered in the practice of relationship-building, the means do not simply reflect the ends; rather the means are the ends. Winning a particular campaign is less important than the practice of weaving people back together. As Elaine put it when I asked her if she had a notion of ultimate meaning, “I think these things come about through practice. Through people being the social change they want to see in the world. It sounds corny but it feels real to me”. My interlocutors share a feeling that emphasising ideologies or abstract issues alone always ends up dehumanising real individuals. As others have argued (Laidlaw, 2014, p.  77), my interlocutors show that it is best to move away from thinking about coherent metaphysical traditions and instead focus on the kinds of characters and relationships that tend towards a good life for all. Now, what I do not wish to do here is to be so reductive as to suggest that ontology doesn’t matter. Clearly it does. My participants are performing a radically social ontology that explicitly rejects a clear distinction between self and other. Indeed, it is my contention that in adopting practices with strong ontological implications and by making statements as to what counts as publicly acceptable behaviour, my interlocutors are laying the foundations for a revised vision of modernity with a thick idea of public virtue at its core. Contra the postmodern dictum, there is ultimate meaning. It’s just that, for my interlocutors, it can only be articulated through practice. What then does it mean that something so ultimate is contained in an everyday practice? In an increasingly diverse world, those seeking to inspire world repairing work often find themselves searching for a philosophical stance that cuts across people’s many differences. My interlocutors suggest that when looking for something shared, it might be better to start with practice. On the other hand, in a world dominated by the logic of capital, conversations often arise in world repairing circles as to whether it wouldn’t be better to adopt some of the strategies of our enemies. My interlocutors would beg to differ. Their practices are not means to some greater end but are realisations of the end they seek.

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References Back, L. (2015). Why Everyday Life Matters: Class, Community and Making Life Livable. Sociology, 49(5), 820–836. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038515589292 Barman, J. (2008). Cascadia Once Upon A Time. In D. Todd (Ed.), Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia. Ronsdale Press. Beaman, L.  G. (2017). Living Well Together in a (Non)Religious Future: Contributions from the Sociology of Religion. Sociology of Religion, 78(1), 9–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srw054 Bonjour, S., & Duyvendak, J.  W. (2018). The ‘Migrant with Poor Prospects’: Racialized Intersections of Class and Culture in Dutch Civic Integration Debates. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(5), 882–900. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01419870.2017.1339897 Bruce, S. (2003). The Social Process of Secularization. In R. K. Fenn (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (1st ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. Calhoun, C. (2004, June 21). The Democratic Integration of Europe. Eurozine (blog). https://www.eurozine.com/the-­democratic-­integration-­of-­europe/ Casanova, J. (2007). Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective. In L.  Beaman & P.  Beyer (Eds.), Religion, Globalization, and Culture (pp. 101–20). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004154070.i-­608.39 Day, A. (2010). Researching Belief Without Asking Religious Questions. Fieldwork in Religion, 4(1), 86–104. https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.v4i1.86 Day, A. (2013). Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World. Oxford University Press. Dinham, A. (2012). Faith and Social Capital after the Debt Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan. Dobbelaere, K. (2011). The Meaning and Scope of Secularization. In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199588961.013.0034. Gordon, U. (2018). Prefigurative Politics Between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise. Political Studies, 66(2), 521–537. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0032321717722363 Habermas, J. (2011). ‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology. In E. Mendieta & J. Van Antwerpen (Eds.), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (5th PRINTING edn.). Columbia University Press. Habermas, J. (1995). Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy, 92(3), 109–131. https://doi.org/10.2307/2940842 Habermas, J. (2005). Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. T.  McCarthy. Beacon Press.

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Habermas, J. (2006). Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy, 14(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-­0378.2006.00241.x Laidlaw, J. (2014). The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge University Press. Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford University Press. Manning, C. (2018). Meaning Making Narratives Among Non-Religious Individuals Facing the End of Life. Understanding Unbelief. https://research. kent.ac.uk/understandingunbelief/research/research-­projects-­2/manning/ Martin, D. (1993). A General Theory of Secularization. Gregg Revivals. McAlexander, J. H., Dufault, B. L., Martin, D. M., & Schouten, J. W. (2014). The Marketization of Religion: Field, Capital, and Consumer Identity. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(3), 858–875. https://doi.org/10.1086/677894 Mellor, P. A., & Schilling, C. (1997). Confluent Love and the Cult of the Dyad: The Pre-Contractual Foundations of Modern Contractarian Relationships. In J.  Davies & G.  Loughlin (Eds.), Sex These Days: Essays on Theology, Sexuality and Society. Sheffield Academic Press. Parsons, T. (1968). On the Concept of Value-Commitments. Sociological Inquiry, 38(2), 135–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-­682X.1968.tb00679.x Sandel, M. J. (2013). What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Skeggs, B. (2014). Values beyond Value? Is Anything beyond the Logic of Capital? The British Journal of Sociology, 65(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1468-­4446.12072 Skidelsky, R., & Skidelsky, E. (2013). How Much Is Enough?: Money and Good Life. Penguin. Woodhead, L. (2016). Is No Religion the New Religion?.

CHAPTER 8

Not Radical, Not Preaching, but Reaching Out to Others: Nonreligious Expressions of Identity and Relationality Through Food Anna Sofia Salonen

Abstract  This chapter provides insights into research on lived nonreligion by exploring how ordinary nonreligious people—living in one neighbourhood in Ottawa, Canada—see themselves and their relations with other people through their everyday food consumption practices. The focus is on how these people present themselves, how they approach negotiations over delicate issues with other people and how they frame their positive visions of living together via food. The findings point to three issues that aid understanding ordinary food consumption as “quasi-­ nonreligious”: distancing from extreme stances when describing one’s own food choices; navigating influencing others’ food choices in a way that avoids giving the impression of proselytising; and emphasizing sharing, hospitality and reaching out to others through food. By approaching ordinary food consumption as “quasi-nonreligion”, the study shows how stepping back from the questions of the presence and/or absence of

A. S. Salonen (*) Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_8

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religion and focusing on other daily settings may help us to start seeing some of the nuances and complexities of nonreligion in everyday life that otherwise often remain obscure. Keywords  Lived nonreligion • Quasi-religion • Food consumption • Identity • Relationality

Towards Lived Expressions of Nonreligion Via Study of Ordinary Food Consumption In this chapter, I explore how ordinary nonreligious people see themselves and their relations with others through their everyday food consumption practices. By doing so, I shed light on the everyday expressions of lived nonreligion (see Beaman, 2017; Lee, 2015; Salonen, 2018). With lived nonreligion, I refer to the manner in which people who do not identify as religious see themselves and the world and how this is ordinarily expressed and manifested. Studying lived experiences of nonreligious individuals is important, since focusing merely on explicit expressions of nonreligion might mask its more tacit and ambivalent manifestations, which encompass most of nonreligious people’s lives. Setting the scene for the study of lived expressions of nonreligion is a challenge, since people might find it hard to put into words nonreligious identities and their expressions (Lee, 2015, p. 24). Therefore, it is instructive to start ‘elsewhere’ (Harvey, 2013, p. 5), to apply creative approaches and unconventional new perspectives. This is essential, since it is not yet well known what occasions and instances are relevant for nonreligious identities and practices (Lee, 2015, p. 25). So far, nonreligion has mostly been studied in relation to how it excludes or differentiates from religion. In order to pave the way for understanding the “nonness” of nonreligion in its own right, I have chosen here to leave aside the question of religion altogether and instead focus on another site where meaning, identity and community are frequently reflected, namely, eating. Food consumption provides one site for the study of lived nonreligion. It can be used to investigate practices, beliefs, meanings and belonging, on the one hand, and distancing, withdrawal and indifference, on the other, without recourse to religion as a defined set of practices, beliefs or affiliation (Salonen, 2018, p. 12). The fact that everybody has to eat makes it possible to explore issues that fall outside the reach of the study of religion

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when an informant chooses to tick the “no religion” box in a survey. People are highly unlikely to place themselves in the category of “non-­ eater”. What we eat, who we eat with, how we express ourselves and identify with food may change, too, so eating constitutes a multifaceted area for study. Previous research has both focused on food in relation to religious traditions (e.g. Zeller et al., 2014) and identified connections and similarities between religion, food and eating (e.g. Gross, 2014; Harvey, 2013; Zeller, 2014, 2015). Zeller, for example, has studied similarities between religion and certain secular foodways. He argues that due to their ability to provide meaning, identity and community to participants, certain proscriptive and prescriptive foodways can be considered as “quasi-religions” (Zeller, 2014, 2015). As inspiring as the deliberations about the relations between food and religion are, they do not consider the possibility of nonreligion. In order to fill this gap, I take a slightly different course here. First, instead of focusing on specific diets, I concentrate on ordinary food consumption that is rarely explicitly or consciously reflected on or that at least does not often take a form of firmly set principles, while still conveying multiple meanings. Second, instead of using features of religion to understand foodways, in this study I use food consumption to illustrate some nuances of nonreligion. I interpret ordinary food consumption as “quasi-nonreligious”—at least insofar as it serves as a reference point for the study of lived nonreligion that focuses on the positive contents of nonreligious people’s lives— and see how this thought exercise can shed light on the lived experiences of nonreligious people.

Research Aim, Data and Methods In this study, I explore how ordinary people who identify as nonreligious see themselves and their relations with others through their everyday food consumption practices. I draw from Lee’s (2015) analysis of power and identities in nonreligious culture by asking how nonreligious people describe themselves and how they exert power over others and from Beaman’s (2017) work on nonreligious individuals’ understanding of their relationship to the world and other people by discussing how my interviewees connect with others. Elsewhere, I have analysed nonreligious identity formation and its entanglements with ordinary life via the specific case of eating or not eating animal meat (Salonen, 2020). Here, I seek to

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find patterns of identifications and relations in broader deliberations on food and eating. By concentrating on food consumption, the study shows how stepping back from the questions of the presence and/or absence of religion and focusing on other daily settings might help us to see some of the nuances and complexities of nonreligion in everyday life. The data consists of interviews with ordinary people living in one neighbourhood in Ottawa, Canada. I selected one neighbourhood as the site of the study, because the place has been found to play an important role in producing food-related meanings (Johnston et  al., 2012). The interviews were conducted in the spring of 2019 as part of a project investigating moderate food consumption in the context of an affluent society (see, e.g. Salonen, 2019, 2020). Seventeen of the 24 study participants identified as either nonreligious (13 participants) or nonpractising Christians (4 participants). In this chapter, I focus on those people’s accounts. In the following discussion, the interviewees are referred to using pseudonyms. Via close reading of each interview, I analysed the accounts where the interviewees described themselves and how they related to others through the lens of food. I concentrated particularly on issues that recurred in the interviews and were shared, with their personal nuances, by many of the interviewees. I focused especially on accounts of “nonness”, such as differentiation and refraining, but also sought to find expressions of connection with others. The analysis brought out three issues that aid understanding ordinary food consumption as “quasi-nonreligious”: distancing from extreme stances when describing one’s own food choices; navigating influencing others’ food choices in a way that avoids giving the impression of proselytising and emphasizing sharing, hospitality and reaching out to others through food.

Expressions of Identity and Relationality Through Food Distancing from Extreme Stances When the nonreligious interviewees described their everyday food practices, this led them to describe who they were—or more precisely, who they were not. A recurring theme was differentiation from extreme stances

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by highlighting that one is not radical, activist or extremist, but rather moderate, ordinary or laidback. An example from the interview with Danielle illustrates this point. During the interview, Danielle frequently underlined that she is not extreme in her food-related thoughts and actions. Even though she considers herself as a food enthusiast, she emphasized that she does not want to “seem too pretentious”. During the interview she talked about certain food practices that she considers unethical, but rushed to add that despite her views, she is “not an activist and I think I would never be an activist”. Moreover, Danielle said that she tries to pay attention to where her food comes from, but, again, highlighted that she is not overly zealous: “I’m not extreme. I try to have a conscious or awareness of where my food comes from and especially here in Northern America I find it’s super hard.” Beatrice, too, distanced herself from extreme stances, giving an example of how she resolves her puzzle of wanting to favour locally produced food and her love for certain food items that come from far away. She explained: “When I’m buying food I’ll check where it’s from and feel really guilty when I buy oranges from Morocco and avocado from Mexico or California and I know that I shouldn’t be buying avocado.” She then went on to explain how she resolves this inner puzzle: My philosophy also with food as with everything is moderation is the key. I’m not an avocado junkie. I’ll go weeks, months without eating it and then it’s like, ‘I need some avocado in my life.’ It’s from really far away but I mean you can’t get that locally. I’m not that radical.

As these examples illustrate, the language of differentiating from extremes was explicit and recurrent in the interviews. In addition to explicitly stating that one is not extreme, radical or activist, another way of expressing an identity that avoids extremes was to emphasize that one eats foods that are considered normal. Shawn, for example, explained that he avoids “exotic” foods and instead eats foodstuffs that are customary in the Canadian culture. With reference to eating meat, he first listed the animals whose meat he is willing to eat and then pointed out what is not on his plate: “I’ll eat beef, I’ll eat chicken, I’ll eat pork, I’ll eat goat meat, I’ll eat lamb. What else is there? Your standard staples. The exotic stuff I’m not into. I’m just a regular Joe.” His final statement shows that with these food choices he identifies firmly as an ordinary person.

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Yet another way to express that one is not extreme is to emphasize an omnivorous palate. Melanie, for example, distanced herself from being finicky. She described herself and her husband as laidback and open to different foods: “We’re not very fussy. We’re not fussy at all. We have a huge range that we like. There’s always something we can eat.” Further, for Melanie, her ordinary omnivorous practice is to an extent a strategic choice. She explains that by refraining from being picky, she gets out of difficult situations: “You see that’s why I eat everything because it’s just much easier, nobody asks any questions, I can go anywhere. So it’s really cowardice in some ways. (Laughs)” For Melanie, distancing from extremes is a social strategy that helps her navigate social situations without drawing undue attention to herself. Navigating Delicate Issues with Others The nonreligious participants also talked about food-related encounters with other people. Here, many of the interviewees pointed out that addressing food-related questions with others is a delicate issue. Many of them pondered how to address these issues without imposing their own views on others too harshly. As an example of this dilemma, Beatrice noted that although she actively raises awareness about food choices, for example, on social media, she is cautious when it comes to the people she lives with. She says: I do share my enthusiasm but with my housemates I tread carefully because I don’t want to seem critical and I don’t want to be telling them. I have to figure out how to have that conversation without being preachy and without being on their case. So sometimes I just choose the easy path and I won’t say anything at all.

Beatrice recognizes the power relations involved in negotiating food-­ related questions with her housemates and thus remains cautious in what she says. In a similar vein, Nina mentioned that influencing other people is tricky “without sounding preachy”. The interviewees above not only feel the need to influence other people’s food choices but also remain ambivalent about the right way to do so. In contrast, Shawn was strictly against influencing other people’s consumption practices. Continuing from a discussion of eating animal meat, he explained that “I don’t think anyone has a right to tell me what I can

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or I can’t eat. Likewise I don’t have a right to tell you what you can and you can’t eat. It’s an individual thing.” Interestingly, however, this strict view does not mean that Shawn does not have strong opinions, quite the contrary. He continued: I think as a society and I’m not preaching, it’s just an observation and I’m not one to tell people how to live their lives or what they should do but I think as a society we have to be a lot more aware of our surroundings, a lot more aware when we walk into a grocery store or for that matter walk into anywhere to realize that because we have what we think is abundantly free that there is a cost for all of this free food, all of this cheap stuff.

Shawn states his views about contemporary food culture, but at the same time carefully points out that what he says should not be interpreted as influencing the individual choices of others, but as a nonjudgemental remark of how he sees the world. Distancing from extremes and unwillingness to address delicate issues with others is not due to insecurity or uncertainty about one’s own position, but about deeply held belief in one’s own opinions, accompanied by allowing others to choose their own paths. As the examples above indicate, addressing delicate issues involves the danger of being considered judgemental. In addition, talking a lot about certain issues runs the risk of being pigeonholed a fanatic. Jeannette spoke about her child’s food allergy and the difficulties that she faces when discussing the issue with other people. She feels “like a broken record” when talking about allergies and says that it is something “I force myself to talk to people about just because it’s so important and so dangerous.” Jeannette was convinced that people need to be educated about the seriousness of allergies, yet she was aware that people might think that she is overreacting: “I think a lot of people think I’m overly paranoid.” This example shows that the wish to not be labelled as radical, raised in the previous section, also affects the extent to which the interviewees feel that they can talk about issues that matter to them deeply. Reaching Out to Others Through Food According to the interviewees, addressing food-related questions with other people is difficult because of the negative emotional response that might follow. Nina noted that “people can get quite emotionally charged

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about certain stuff” and then explained that this response is understandable given the centrality that food plays in people’s lives. She continued: “Food is part of our life right? It almost defines who we are sometimes so it can be kind of a tricky and fun thing to talk about obviously.” By mentioning both the intricacy and joyfulness of talking about food, Nina underlines that eating can both separate and connect people. Similarly, Hannah noted that people can get defensive when talking about food choices and that with people who suffer from diet-related health problems, “it’s sort of taboo to talk” about food. In this context, Hannah explicitly referenced the parallels between religion and food. She says: “I think it’s like religion. I mean you can obviously cook for people but you can’t tell them, ‘Go buy this.’” Hannah chooses the “nonreligious” path as she refrains from telling people what to eat, but instead chooses to serve food to them. This notion, while indicating that food is a difficult theme to talk about, also implies the idea of sharing and hospitality. Without proselytising, one can cook for other people, which can be a way of reaching out to others. The ideal of sharing food with other people was deeply held and cherished in the interviews. Despite, and perhaps even because of, the delicacy of the matter, eating was considered as an important platform for forming and embedding connections with others. When the interviewees were asked to recall important, significant and emotional food memories, the positive stories most often related to eating together. These moments were described as magical, invigorating, wonderful, fun and loving moments to reminisce about. Many interviewees recalled that eating together was important in their childhood family, and for many, it still constituted the essential core or at least an ideal of family life. Eating together creates space for gratitude and recognition, as illustrated in an example given by Tom. He described cooking with his spouse: “we can both make food or one person can make food and share and someone can actually say, ‘This is good,’ or, ‘Thank you for making the food.’” Food and the words that cooking for others elicit serve as connectors in Tom’s intimate relation with his partner. Many of the interviewees pointed out that serving food to others and eating together is not only a practical thing to do, but also an important philosophy. Alan aptly summarized this by stating: “It’s one of those fundamental human things. It’s one of those things that has made humans successful is that hospitality and sharing. That is a fundamental human

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value. It’s worth keeping.” Elsewhere in this interview, Alan explained this on a more personal level: This just goes back to food being one of these fundamental human values and that fundamental morality of sharing food, having food. For me in particular because I’m not a big fan of eating food, for me it’s particularly feeding people. It’s very important to me to feed people.

In a similar vein, Ursula said: “I like food. I’m happy with food. I love cooking it, I love preparing it, I love serving it. […] I think food is fundamental. Food is a connector. My sister jokes that I say ‘food is love,’ but food is love. (Laughs) I really do think that. (Laughs)” The philosophy of serving food to others is not just an ideal; it is also a prescriptive norm. Failing to accomplish it can be considered a disaster. Jeannette explained how she sees it: It’s always better to have too much than not enough. My sister and I talked about it this weekend. There’s nothing that I hate more than having people come to my house and feeling that they can’t have seconds or thirds of something that they like because they’re not going to have enough. So you come to my house and there will always be enough.

Carla described a similar idea. For her, it doesn’t feel right to not be prepared. […] So it’s that whole thing, you have to treat your guests and you have to be prepared to serve your guests and you have to offer them things and you have to be ready for anything. I’ve been programmed. I don’t think there’s any escaping that. I could not cope.

For these interviewees, serving food to others is a deeply internalized social norm that one cannot escape from.

Discussion and Conclusions Studying lived expressions of nonreligion is challenging, since nonreligious identities are often ambivalent, diffuse and hard to put into words explicitly. When asked, people may identify as nonreligious for various reasons, ranging from committed unbelief, through indifference, to a need to reject religious category labels altogether and carve out space for

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alternative self-understandings (Lee 2014, 2015, p. 26). I have deliberately set aside the explicit questions about religion and its absence here, in order to make room for nonreligious individuals’ self-expressed ways of being and living with others. The findings portray the nonreligious interviewees as individuals who readily refrain from extreme identity labels, who avoid imposing their views on others, but who seek to connect with others through sharing and hospitality. In the following discussion, in the spirit of interpreting ordinary food consumption as quasi-nonreligion, I discuss how these notions might aid us in studying lived expressions of nonreligion and nonreligious people. First, drawing on how the informants distanced themselves from extremes, I suggest that refraining from rigid identity categories might well be one of the characteristics of contemporary nonreligion that extends from the explicit questions of religion to other branches of life and beyond the question of identity into encounters with others. Lee (2015, p. 21) highlights that “atheist and other non-religious cultures can be decentered in a range of ways, not all of which imply that the individual is uncertain in his or her atheist or non-religious cultural or intellectual positions but rather that these decentered cultures are concrete in their own right.” In a similar vein, maintaining that one is not “extreme” in one’s food choices does not mean that one is insecure or uncertain, but that a positioning outside extremes is as solid as any other. This study hints that expressions of nonreligious identities can be embedded in larger cultural repertoires, illustrated in food consumption, where people distance themselves from both “positive” and “negative” extremes (Carins & Johnston, 2015), where faithful compliance with moral ideas is considered rigid and ideological and where authenticity is given a higher moral value than explicit ethical principles (Grauel, 2016). Second, this study sheds light on how nonreligious people relate to others. As Lee (2015) points out, nonreligious cultural expressions are not only influenced by, but themselves influence the outside culture. Nuances of these power relations are often hard to detect by asking explicit questions about religion. Here, drawing parallels with food and eating is helpful. This study shows that when it comes to food, people avoid exerting direct power on others, but instead use tacit strategies or refrain from trying to influence others altogether. This can be interpreted not only as having limited room to raise one’s viewpoints in contemporary society, but also as an effort to give room to others and respect commitments that

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differ from one’s own. Thinking and talking about the extent of our abilities to influence the world inspires the actualization of ways of making a difference (Perrin, 2006; Huddart Kennedy et  al., 2018). The nonreligious participants both limit themselves and carve out space to voice their views. Their nonreligious imaginations of relations with others seem to support a culture and a world in which people can pursue their lives in their own way, without being exposed to indoctrination, no matter how well intended. Third, this study encourages researchers of nonreligion to seek common ground between people instead of concentrating merely on difference or indifference. Rather than focusing only on questions of identity, self-description and differences between religion and nonreligion, it might be instructive to explore how nonreligion is lived in terms of reaching out to others. Based on her research with nonreligious sea turtle conservationists, Beaman (2017, p. 26) suggests an emerging worldview that is characterized by respectful relations, humility and connections. In the context of food consumption, one such connector is the philosophy of sharing and hospitality. While talking about food and eating is a contentious ground on which one ought to “tread carefully”, the actual acts of eating are potential sites for connecting with others. This is illustrated by how the interviewees aimed at influencing others with their actions instead of words and by how they framed eating and sharing as fundamental expressions of humanity that connect rather than divide us. In conclusion, there are certain limitations to this exploration. First, I have not considered many critical issues inherent in food consumption that merit attention. For example, food and eating are closely related to social class, gender, race and care, all of which call for much more nuanced analysis than the scope of this short study allows. These questions are by no means irrelevant for the study of nonreligion. Second, I do not mean to state that we ought to reject the category of religion and replace it with food. I rather suggest that food and eating can be used as imaginative tools to understand lived experiences of nonreligion. There is a need to avoid oversimplification; yet, there is also a need for creative approaches to nonreligion that go beyond comparison with religion. Food and eating can provide one site for such research. Finally, studying lived nonreligion through food consumption alone is not enough. I do not think that this approach could or should become the mainstream of study of nonreligion. Nevertheless, a certain amount of

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radical thinking is needed in the study of lived nonreligion. By this I mean that in order to do justice to the voices of nonreligious people and expressions of nonreligion in everyday life we need various, multisite, creative approaches, coupled with imagination and wonder. Analysing ordinary food consumption as quasi-nonreligion does not explain or solve the puzzle of lived nonreligion once and for all, but it can serve as a reference point for our imagination as researchers, to inspire new questions and as a springboard for further studies.

References Beaman, L. (2017). Living Well Together in a (Non)religious Future: Contributions from the Sociology of Religion. Sociology of Religion a Quarterly Review, 78, 9–32. Carins, K., & Johnston, J. (2015). Food and Femininity. Bloomsbury. Grauel, J. (2016). Being Authentic or Being Responsible? Food Consumption, Morality and the Presentation of Self. Journal of Consumer Culture, 16, 852–869. Gross, A. (2014). The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications. Columbia University Press. Harvey, G. (2013). Food, Sex and Strangers. Understanding Religion as Everyday Life. Acumen. Huddart Kennedy, E., Parkins, J.  R., & Johnston, J. (2018). Food Activists, Consumer Strategies, and the Democratic Imagination: Insights from Eat-­ Local Movements. Journal of Consumer Culture, 18(1), 149–168. Johnston, J., Rodney, A., & Szabo, M. (2012). Place, Ethics, and Everyday Eating: A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods. Sociology, 46, 1091–1108. Lee, L. (2014). Secular or nonreligious? Investigating and interpreting generic ‘not religious’ categories and populations. Religion, 44(3), 466–482. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2014.904035 Lee, L. (2015). Ambivalent Atheist Identities: Power and Non-Religious Culture in Contemporary Britain. Social Analysis, 59(2), 20–39. Perrin, A. (2006). Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life. The University of Chicago Press. Salonen, A.  S. (2018). Living and Dealing with Food in an Affluent Society. A Case for the Study of Lived (Non)religion. Religions, 9(10), 306. Salonen, A. S. (2019). Dominion, Stewardship and Reconciliation in the Accounts of Ordinary People Eating Animals. Religions, 10(12), 669. Salonen, A.  S. (2020). Ruoka, runsauden tila ja ei-uskonnollisuuden aika. Eletyn ei-uskonnollisuuden tutkimusmahdollisuuksia. [Food, Abundant Space and Nonreligious Time. Opportunities for Research on Lived Nonreligion]. In: Uskonto ajassa ja tilassa [Religion in Time and Space], Suvi-Maria Saarelainen ja Joona Salminen eds. STKS & SKH.

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Zeller, B. (2014). Quasi-Religious American Foodways. The Cases of Vegetarianism and Locavorism. In B. E. Zeller, M. W. Dallam, R. L. Neilson, & N. L. Rubel (Eds.), Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (pp. 295–312). Columbia University Press. Zeller, B. (2015). Totem and Taboo in the Grocery Store. Quasi-Religious Foodways in North America. Religion and Food. Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 26, 11–31. Zeller, B. E., Dallam, M. W., Neilson, R. L., Rubeland, N. L., & Finch, M. (Eds.). (2014). Religion, Food, and Eating in North America. Columbia University Press.

PART IV

Living Well Together in a New Diversity

CHAPTER 9

“World Repairing” and ‘Non religious’ in Law: Antithetical Notions or New Mindsets? Dia Dabby

Abstract  This chapter seeks to engage with law’s understanding of non religious commitments. When brought before the courts, these engagements are expressed and justified through the language of “culture”, “spirituality” or “philosophy”. Drawing on three recent cases from Canadian, American and British jurisdictions, this chapter contends that the non-­religious commitments offer distinctive elements to understanding what non-religion and ‘world repairing’ (the latter as coined by Linda Woodhead) look like in law’s realm. This chapter suggests that particular citizenship-building capacities are developed through these case studies and also invite closer scrutiny on how we understand and articulate

Assistant Professor, Département des sciences juridiques, UQÀM. The author wishes to thank Lori G. Beaman and Timothy Stacey for their kind invitation to the 2018 workshop and the opportunity to think about and participate in this volume. Any errors remain mine alone. D. Dabby (*) Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), Montreal, QC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_9

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considerations related to time and visibility in the context of non-religious claims. Ultimately, this chapter contributes to how non-religious commitments in law are considered as ‘otherworldly’ engagements, in order to offer a more textured understanding of how different people can get along. Keywords  Non-religious commitments • Law’s understanding • Legal claims • Spiritual • Otherworldly commitments • Philosophical claims

Introduction In recent years, non-religion has gained more traction amongst those studying everyday beliefs and belonging in a context of declining traditional religious affiliation. Linda Woodhead has explained this through an uptick in what she has called ‘world-repairing’ actions (2016; Beaman, 2017, p. 11). By contrast, Lori G. Beaman has highlighted instead a rise in what she has termed “manifestations of deep equality”, which speak to “a nonlegal formulation of equality that looks to the everyday actions of people as foundational to living well together” (Beaman, 2017, p.  11). Both Woodhead and Beaman underscore spiritual engagements that fall outside of the realm of traditional religion and community. It is worth highlighting that neither world-repairing nor deep equality are meant to be exclusively about non-religion, but rather about how different people get along. The redefining of beliefs also requires a redefinition of the communities to which they are attributed, as highlighted by Beaman and Timothy Stacey in the introduction to this volume. Demographic trends also support an important populational shift in how we understand and (re)shape the social determinants of belonging, as discussed elsewhere in this volume. Simply put, non-religion is being placed at the forefront of our collective contemplation, whether we are ready for it or not. In this context, legal claims of non-religion require new rules of language before the courts. This chapter seeks to engage with law’s understanding of non-religion and ‘world-repairing’ and, as such, contributes to how these terms are framed and (re)shaped through law’s lens. I draw here on three recent cases to frame my reading of this turn in law. I also highlight that these are but three (by no means exhaustive) understandings of what ‘world-repairing’ can look like through law’s lens and serve solely to illustrate the richness of non-religious commitments which may exist and circulate: first, in

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the context of Servatius v. Alberni School District No. 70, 2020 BCSC 15, which examined the place of Indigenous culture in the Canadian school context; second, by way of Casamitjana v. League Against Cruel Sports, 2020 UKET 3331129/2018,1 a case in the United Kingdom which assessed whether ethical veganism was protected as a ‘qualified belief’ under section 10 of the 2010 Equality Act; and third, by way of Sedlock v. Baird, 235 Cal. App. 4th 874 (2015), a Californian case where certain parents challenged the practice of yoga in the elementary school setting (see also Dabby & Barras, 2018). While these cases may seem unrelated, from different jurisdictions and ultimately extraneous to our understanding of non-religion in law, I contend that they highlight some of the nuances that exist when putting spiritual or philosophical claims to work in the legal context (on the reframing of non-religious claims before the courts, see Beaman et al., 2018). Ultimately, this chapter contributes to the elaboration of the vocabulary and grammar of non-religious and ‘world-repairing’ claims before the courts.

Situating Ourselves, Situating Law? One may well wonder what non-religion, in the vocabulary of Woodhead’s ‘world-repairing’ and Beaman’s ‘manifestations of deep equality’, look like in the context of law. Three points are helpful to situating my modest contribution: first, a point on the terminology of ‘world-repairing’. By their very nature, notions of ‘repair’ and ‘reparations’ exist in the common law tradition, by way of equity. Such a legal action, in the context of torts, seeks to re-establish parties to their previous station. This often refers to pecuniary damages. Thus, ‘repairing’ in an initial legal context refers to monetary redress rather than emotional enrichment or amelioration. The latter framing raises both a different kind of question and answer. Second, my contribution does not seek to work outside of law’s realm, but rather, 1  My thanks to Peter Daly, solicitor for Jordi Casamitjana, for facilitating access to certain documents in this case. The preliminary hearing for the case, cited here, determined that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief. The case was settled during the full hearing in early March 2020, where the employer recognized that the employee was not in the wrong for bringing up concerns about the pension fund investments, which did not cohere with his philosophical (and now-recognized) beliefs. See Press Association, “‘Ethical Vegan’ settles case against charity” The Guardian (March 2, 2020), online: https://www.theguardian. com/money/2020/mar/02/ethical-vegan-jordi-casamitjana-settles-tribunalcase-against-charity

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employ it to confront how we understand, frame and interrogate our (otherworldly) commitments. This stands in contrast with Beaman’s approach—which we have discussed, both together (Dabby & Beaman, 2019, pp.  426–428) and apart (Dabby, forthcoming)—which concentrates on everyday exchanges which occur outside of law’s formalistic realm, “includ[ing] cooperation, agonistic respect, generosity, negotiation, forgiveness, contaminated diversity, immanence, similarity, humor, discomfort, neighborliness, and love. It is located between the sameness and difference in the mutual recognition of similarities” (Beaman, 2017, p. 11). Lastly, as a legal scholar, I consider it important to stress that while law’s intrinsic formalisms may curb some of the exchanges between individuals and communities, due to requirements of form or function, we still can learn from how law and legal decisions shape and refashion stories of belonging, which ultimately enrich our understanding of new commitments.

Stories of Non-religion, Commitments and Law Commitments to non-religion may be articulated in a variety of ways before the courts. They may be expressed as a cultural, spiritual or philosophical engagement. Yet the challenges that arise from the expression of non-religion before the law are manifold. First, it is important to note that non-religious or world-repairing views in law do not always occur by way of a crisis and do not necessarily end up in the formal legal setting of the courts. These views connect with Beaman’s approach to everyday acts and exchanges, as referenced earlier. Second, a non-religious claim must often follow the same path and structure as religious claims, which dampen or dull the very edges that distinguish one from the other. While this approach expands and multiplies the beliefs protected, it doesn’t necessarily alter the starting point, which remains unapologetically religious. In legal texts, freedom of religion and conscience are generally explicitly protected: the result is that the test developed to demonstrate an infringement starts from a base understanding of religious beliefs (a similar argument in the context of the study of non-religion more broadly is made by Smith & Cragun, 2019). This mapping onto religion’s framework feeds into the expression—and ultimately—circulation of one’s non-religious commitments. Valérie Amiraux’s concerns on visibility of religious expression (2016, p.  42) can also inform our interests here, namely, on how non-­ religious commitments are made visible and by whom. Finally, the framing

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of claims as spiritual or cultural, rather than religious, can lead to a certain (legal) fuzziness in terms of their weight and respect before the courts. Furthermore, the shifting of majoritarian claims from ‘religious’ to ‘cultural’ in an effort to protect religious patrimony (e.g., Beaman, 2012, p. 78, 2020) does not help foster cultural or spiritual arguments as freestanding arguments which are deserving equal protection. When conjugated, we may question how we both argue the contours of non-religion through law and, relatedly, how we frame cultural, spiritual and philosophical commitments before the courts. * * * In Servatius, the British Columbia Supreme Court examined whether the promotion of Indigenous culture in a primary school classroom constituted religious indoctrination contrary to the purpose and scope of the British Columbia School Act (most notably, s. 76). Throughout the court’s decision, the claimant’s children were described as either ‘observers’ or ‘witnesses’ to these practices and never as active participants (paras. 1, 6, 45, 51).2 Indigenous culture was disseminated by way of smudging ceremonies and hoop dancing in the Port Alberni school. Given the sociodemographic makeup of the region in British Columbia, where approximately 30% of the students in the school district are Indigenous (para. 5), it is at once foreseeable and coherent that the school district includes Indigenous activities in the curriculum. Furthermore, this fits into the broader imperative to include Indigenous worldviews into the school curriculum in the province. In this regard, the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council (NTC) had entered into agreements with various school districts to promote Indigenous worldviews. The NTC argued that smudging was seen as a “cultural practice, not a religious one” (para. 9); according to the court, smudging and hoop dancing underscored instead “a gathering momentum to incorporate the teaching of Indigenous worldviews and perspectives” (para. 94). The court seems to draw a line between spiritual experience and religious indoctrination, noting “religious freedom is not compromised when students are taught about other beliefs. If, however, the children underwent a baptism, this would be far over the line” (para. 2  This point was contradicted by the claimant’s testimony and that of her daughter; ultimately, however, the judge considered that their evidence was not reliable (Serviatus, para. 47).

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107). Here the court distinguishes between learning about different traditions, even if this may result in “cognitive dissonance” (para. 108) and undergoing a ritual. In Casamitjana, the Employment Tribunal in the United Kingdom sought to determine whether ethical veganism constituted a philosophical belief which could be qualified as a ‘protected belief’ within the framework of the Equality Act. Jordi Casamitjana, a zoologist by training and then head of policy research for the League Against Cruel Sports (LASC), was dismissed from the LASC’s employ. This occurred after Casamitjana learnt that the LASC’s pension fund held investments in companies that went against his ethical veganist beliefs. Casamitjana had asked that the pension funds be transferred to ethical holdings, which had been refused by the organization (Submission on behalf of the Claimant (preliminary hearing), at paras. 2–4). It is worth stressing here that our interest resides in the preliminary hearing, rather than on the merits of the case, since it is here that the tribunal articulates the commitments that the claimant makes to his vision of ethical veganism. As noted by the judge, “[e]thical vegans could be said to be moralistically oriented and opposed to all forms of exploitation of all animals and to embody genuine philosophical concerns for all sentient beings” (paras. 14, 17). In this particular form of ‘world-­ repairing’, the claimant goes to great lengths, in all facets of his life, to live through and up his commitments to “the interaction of human and non-­ human animal life” (para. 35). A vivid portrait of “a day in the (ethical veganist) life” of the claimant by the tribunal (para. 22) highlights that many everyday acts and activities buttress his beliefs, ranging from his consumer habits, his diet, his lifestyle, his financial choices, modes of transportation and even his relationships (para. 20). Lastly, at issue in Sedlock was whether a yoga programme developed for the school district went against the US Constitution’s non-establishment clause. As I have discussed elsewhere with Amélie Barras (2018), the poses were stripped of their religious appurtenance and reshaped to appeal to the American palate, both through form and function: the remaking of practices for the purposes of the American student population was an exercise of curation, ultimately rendering the unknown, familiar. Positions such as lotus, for instance, were rebranded as “criss-cross applesauce” (see discussion in Dabby & Barras, 2018, pp. 279, 286). Much like Serviatus, the Sedlock parents argued that the yoga programme constituted religious indoctrination, with the concern that it would ultimately threaten their children’s Christian roots. The yoga programme was presented as a unique

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and ultimately, non-religious programme by the Encinitas Union School District, “which sought to improve the ‘physical and mental health’ of students” (Sedlock, at para. 13; Dabby & Barras, 2018, p. 279). Sedlock highlights not only the fuzzy line in law between what could be considered ‘spiritual’ and what would fall under the realm of ‘religion’, but also how we equip future citizens to ‘live well together’, to draw on Beaman’s terminology. * * * Serviatus, Casamitjana and Sedlock offer widely different perspectives on what we could term world-repairing visions of non-religion, by way of law. Time and visibility emerge as two characteristics relevant to our understanding of world-repairing by way of law, which both speak to particular citizenship-building capacities. Interestingly, the three cases considered speak to the multiplicity of ‘ideal types’ of ‘religion’s other’, to draw on Smith and Cragun’s recently coined terminology. Serviatus and Casamitjana highlight the role that time plays in law’s framing of spiritual or philosophical beliefs. Whereas the former draws on time to repair past wrongs, thereby justifying the inclusion of indigenous beliefs in the school curriculum, the latter draws on time to prevent future wrongs. By contrast, Sedlock grounds our notion of time to remind us of the current moment and ensure situatedness, by way of the school’s yoga programme. All three, however, speak to commitments taken, highlighting the element of time. For instance, in Casamitjana, the tribunal carefully enumerates the steps taken in time to ensure a vegan approach to all facets of his life (Casamitjana, para. 10). By contrast, Sedlock emphasizes the importance of breathing exercises as being a vital component for individual contemplation (Sedlock, para. 18). The second characteristic that transpires from our cases is that of visibility. All three cases illustrate different forms of non-religious commitments, rendered visible through their passage in law. Andrea Brighenti has proposed that ‘visibility’ be a category in the social sciences, advancing that it “lies at the intersection of the two domains of aesthetics (relations of perception) and politics (relations of power)” (2007, p. 324). Relevant to our purposes, non-religious commitments, by way of visibility, help us understand the relational component that exist in this developing field. Ultimately, ‘visibility’ can do work here in terms of classification (Brighenti, 2007, pp. 335–336) of types of non-religious commitments which may

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exist and circulate. Our cases also go in this direction. In Serviatus, for instance, visibility is articulated in two different ways. First, by way of judicial notice of ‘relevant history’ which “has affected Indigenous people in Canadian society” (para. 15 in fine)3, and second, in recognizing that school spaces are made ‘safer’ by the practices of Indigenous worldviews in the classrooms (para. 86). Visibility and time offer two elements through which to express how we understand otherworldly, albeit not religious, commitments. Ultimately, however, the three cases speak to different forms of civic engagement or commitments that do not find their origin through traditional forms of religious belonging.

Conclusion This chapter has contributed to the elaboration of the vocabulary and grammar of non-religious and ‘world-repairing’ claims before the courts. It has offered pathways to engage with law’s understanding of non-­religion and ‘world-repairing’, by drawing on three recent cases. Serviatus, Sedlock and Casamitjana highlight what ‘world-repairing’ can look like through law’s lens and demonstrate the multiplicity of non-religious commitments which may exist and circulate in our current age. Yet these cases also engage with different facets of citizenship-building capacities, through dietary choices, spiritual experiences and incorporations of ‘self-care’ into daily life.4 Law’s contribution to understanding world-repairing commitments is still in flux, much like other areas engaging in these types of reflections. Yet elements such as time and visibility can better circumscribe and articulate world-repairing and non-religious commitments in law. Framing commitments as ‘otherworldly’ in law, rather than simply non-­ religious, allows for a broader palate of shades of belonging. Ultimately, however, this chapter has accentuated how law and legal decisions shape and refashion stories, which ultimately enrich our understanding of new commitments. 3  The Court notes the irony of the complaint of religious indoctrination in the context of the harm experienced by those in the residential school system: Serviatus, paras. 72, 74. 4  Yoga in schools hasn’t only be addressed through the Sedlock case. See Rick Rojas, “In a Plan to Bring Yoga to Alabama Schools, Stretching Is Allowed. ‘Namaste’ Isn’t” New York Times (March 9, 2020), online: www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/us/alabama-yoga-­ schools.html

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References Amiraux, V. (2016). Visibility, Transparency and Gossip: How Did the Religion of Some (Muslims) Become the Public Concern of Others? Critical Research on Religion, 4(1), 37–56. Beaman, L. G. (2012). The Battle over Symbols: The ‘Religion’ of the Minority Versus the ‘Culture’ of the Majority. Journal of Law and Religion, 28(1), 64–104. Beaman, L.  G. (2017). Living Well Together in a (Non)religious Future: Contributions from the Sociology of Religion. Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, 78(1), 9–32. Beaman, L. G. (2020). The Transition of Religion to Culture in Law and Public Discourse. Routledge. Beaman, L. G., Steele, C., & Pringlitz, K. (2018). The Inclusion of Nonreligion in Religion and Human Rights. Social Compass, 65(1), 43–61. Brighenti, A. (2007). Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences. Current Sociology, 55(3), 323–342. Casamitjana v. League Against Cruel Sports. (2020). UKET 3331129/2018. Dabby, D. (forthcoming). Religious Diversity in Public Schools: Rethinking the Role of Law. UBC Press. Dabby, D., & Barras, A. (2018). Bent Out of Shape: Fictions of Yoga and Religion Before the Courts. Religion and Human Rights, 13(3), 270–296. Dabby, D., & Beaman, L. G. (2019). Diversity in Death: A Case Study of a Muslim Cemetery Project in Quebec. In R. Sandberg, N. Doe, B. Kane, & C. Roberts (Eds.), Research Handbook on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Law and Religion (pp. 420–437). Edward Elgar Publishing. Equality Act. (2010). (UK), c 15. Press Association. (2020, March 2). ‘Ethical Vegan’ Settles Case Against Charity. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/mar/02/ ethical-­vegan-­jordi-­casamitjana-­settles-­tribunal-­case-­against-­charity Rojas, R. (2020, March 9). In a Plan to Bring Yoga to Alabama Schools, Stretching is Allowed. ‘Namaste’ Isn’t. New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/ us/alabama-­yoga-­schools.html School Act. (1996). RSBC, c 412. Sedlock v. Baird. (2015). 235 Cal. App. 4th 874. Servatius v. Alberni School District No. 70. (2020). BCSC 15. Smith, J., & Cragun, R. (2019). Mapping Religion’s Other: A Review of the Study of Nonreligion and Secularity. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 58(2), 319–335. Submission on Behalf of the Claimant (Preliminary Hearing). Casamitjana, v. The League Against Cruel Sports, Case No. 3331129/2018. Woodhead, L. (2016). Is No Religion the New Religion? Paper presented at the 78th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Seattle, Washington.

CHAPTER 10

Collaboration Across Difference: New Diversities and the Challenges of Our Times Lori G. Beaman

Abstract  The increase in nonreligion is frequently juxtaposed against that which has declined. In the societies on which we are focusing in this volume this means traditional Christian majoritarianism. However, in this chapter I argue that such a juxtaposition both misses important aspects of the picture and constructs a binary between nonreligion and Christianity which fails to capture the complex ways in which people live their lives. Specifically, in everyday life social actors draw from a number of meaning-­ making frames. This meaning-making takes place in the context of an invigorated diversity that includes institutional religion, sometimes in new forms such as ‘extra-institutional religion’ (Ganiel, Transforming Post-­ Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; Religious Practice in a Post-Catholic Ireland: Towards a Concept of ‘Extra-Institutional Religion’. Social Compass, 66, 471–487, 2019); nonreligion in its many forms (atheist, agnostic, spiritual

L. G. Beaman (*) Department of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_10

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but not religious (SBNR), indifferents, humanists); the accelerated presence of migrant religions; and a renewed presence of Indigenous spiritualities (Beaman, Recognize the New Religious Diversity. Canadian Diversity, 14, 17–19, 2017a). Negotiating and navigating this terrain, in addition to a broader ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec, Super-Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30, 1024–1054, 2007; Talking Around Super-­Diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42, 125–139, 2019), is part of living in a complex society and living well together. Keywords  Social change • Living well together • Lived religion • New diversity • Stewardship • Equality The increase in nonreligion is frequently juxtaposed against that which has declined. In the societies on which we are focusing in this volume this means traditional Christian majoritarianism. However, in this chapter I argue that such a juxtaposition both misses important aspects of the picture and constructs a binary between nonreligion and Christianity which fails to capture the complex ways in which people live their lives. Specifically, in everyday life social actors draw from a number of meaning-­ making frames. This meaning-making takes place in the context of an invigorated diversity that includes institutional religion, sometimes in new forms such as ‘extra-institutional religion’ (Ganiel, 2016, 2019); nonreligion in its many forms (atheist, agnostic, spiritual but not religious (SBNR), indifferents, humanists); the accelerated presence of migrant religions; and a renewed presence of Indigenous spiritualities (Beaman, 2017a). Negotiating and navigating this terrain, in addition to a broader ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec, 2007, 2019), is part of living in a complex society and living well together. Scholarship addressing this increasingly complex and religiously interesting context is sometimes polarized, often migrating around two poles which I describe as the ‘will to religion’ and the ‘will to nonreligion’. In the first instance, I am referring to the pro-religion stance that seeks to count any link to religion, in any form, however tenuous, as ‘religious’. This may take the shape of an affirmation of the universal need or capacity of human beings to be spiritual, which is translated as the need for religion or even the biological imperative toward religion (Bellah, 2011). This approach attempts to reclaim the space religion has traditionally occupied. It moves beyond scholarship to popular culture and policy, sometimes

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incorporating the ubiquitous ‘over 80% of the world’s population has a religious identity’ (see Birdsall and Beaman (2020) for a critique). The second pole refers to the anti-religion stance that seeks to dismiss claims to religious identity from those who do not participate in any of the formal practices associated with that religion or to declare all of those who self-­ describe as nonreligious as ‘atheist’ (Brown, 2017), even if they themselves do not use that label. Incredible feats of quantitative calculating are performed to minimize or maximize numbers of the (non)religious, depending on one’s desired result. And yet, religious identity and nonreligion are particularly difficult to quantify (Hackett, 2014), never mind define. The critical study of religion, which I take to include nonreligion, has been the subject of attention in two recent scholarly collections that turn their attention to the dilemma of normative cheerleading and extra empirical validation. First, Véronique Altglas and Matthew Wood (2018, p.  5) remind us that “whether religion is good or bad is a theological question, not a sociological one”. Given that much social policy and even social science begins with an assumption that religion is a social good, this statement is not as uncontentious as it might once have been. Altglas and Wood (2018) argue that by giving too much weight to agency and subjectivity and too little to social relations and the context in which they take place we risk ignoring social power. One of the key points made by Altglas and Wood is that religion (and nonreligion) must be understood in social context. One consequence of separating religion out is an exaggerated sense of its salience. Nonreligion disappears. In their argument for a more critical approach, Altglas and Wood (2018, p. 6) state: “a critical sociology of religion avoids sacralising (and hence insulating) its object as religious sociology does. Rather, it envisages religion as socially constructed and as a prism through which to understand the social beyond the narrow description of religion for itself, making it a social phenomenon that needs to be studied in conjunction with other social trends and facts—the family, authority, work, ethnicity, health, and so forth”. I argue that nonreligion can equally be substituted here for religion. The second collection also begins by putting the social construction of religion (and, I would argue, nonreligion) at the center of a critical approach to religion that foregrounds social interaction and social structure. Mia Lövheim and Mikael Stenmark (2020) argue for a constructive criticism of religion that considers how social and institutional contexts both enable and constrain critique and its contents. Of particular

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interest to them is the role diversity plays in shaping the social and institutional context. They note that religious and cultural diversity is “often depicted as a challenge for the functioning of democratic societies” (Lövheim & Stenmark, 2020, p. 5). As I noted at the beginning of this discussion, this diversity is characterized by an intensity that may in fact be something new. This is due to two shifts, which include the simultaneous developments in the four areas I mentioned, and the sense of a global order that takes human rights as a benchmark for navigating and negotiating religious differences (Selby et  al. 2018). Lövheim and Stenmark (2020) are correct to signal that there are both normative and descriptive elements to ‘diversity’ as it currently circulates as a conceptual touchstone. A deep engagement with the social change we are experiencing in relation to religion and nonreligion, including the new diversity and its manifestation in various forms in diverse contexts, requires that we suspend assumptions and desires about what we wish were the case and focus on how religion and nonreligion are being produced and constructed in everyday life, within groups and by social institutions. Challenging binaries (and I realize I am using ‘religion/nonreligion’ in such a way in this chapter) is a key part of that critical and deep engagement. However, this is uncomfortable territory for many: it means letting go of the idea of the inherent goodness or badness of religion or nonreligion. It means acknowledging one’s own desire to see religion, or nonreligion, in social engagements, processes, and institutions. Ultimately, Altglas and Wood (2018) are correct: this is about power. Beyond the articulation of problems in the advancement of critical scholarship by Altglas and Wood (2018) and Lövheim and Stenmark (2020), some scholarship has taken up the task of assessing social change related to religion and its social consequences. One example is the 2017 book by Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, Leaving Christianity, in which the authors carefully document the decline in Christianity in Canada during the past 50 years. They draw on data from churches, Statistics Canada, and other social surveys to conclude that “[d]ecline in Christian affiliation, membership, and participation started in the 1960s and has picked up pace rapidly since then. This trend is likely to continue and, indeed, accelerate as an increasing portion of the country’s population— among youth especially—have never been exposed to Christianity” (Clarke & Macdonald, 2017, p. 11). Clarke and Macdonald are faculty members at the Toronto School of Theology at the University of Toronto. In their opening chapter they comment, “We do not regret the end of Christian

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dominance. That has made possible diversity and tolerance, which as Christians we embrace” (Clarke & Macdonald, 2017, p. 12). In contrast to narratives of return, rejuvenation, and circulation which have dominated Canadian social science for a number of decades, Clarke and Macdonald are unequivocal in their assessment: Christianity has declined by 30% from 96% of the population in 1961 to 67% in the 2011 National Household Survey and it is unlikely to rebound. Sensibly, while they do not suggest that Christianity will disappear, they do raise concerns about the social consequences of this shift in power, especially in relation to charitable giving and volunteering. These concerns go to the heart of the focus of this volume, raising the question of whether world-repairing work depends on a religious worldview. The chapters by Tim Stacey, Julia Itel, and Anna Salonen suggest that it does not, and in fact, their work is suggestive of the possibility that we have moved beyond the question of religion/ nonreligion and world-repairing work. They focus on the imaginaries of those who do world-repairing work and who also happen to not see being religious as an important part of their identities. But nonetheless we realize that the question of the impact of the current shifts resulting in a new diversity remain important to many people. Clarke and Macdonald’s (2017) work correctly raises the question of the relationship between religious and nonreligious worldviews, social relations, and social action. Recent research by Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme (2020) suggests that there is a correlation between religious participation, volunteering, and charitable giving that may leave a gap in social supports, but this is not of a scale to warrant moral panic.1 They state: “the very worst of these fears are not being fully realized: a certain proportion of nones and marginal affiliates are volunteering their time and donating their money to causes they believe in, just not at the higher rates found among active affiliates” (Thiessen & Wilkins-Laflamme, 2020, p.  135). Their scholarship puts us in an excellent position to identify potential negative social consequences of increased nonreligion and to develop strategies for addressing them. The reader could be forgiven for questioning the degree of attention I’ve given to religion thus far. But understanding the context, particularly the historical residue that Christianity has imprinted on society, is vital to answering the question of living well together in a complex future 1  See Dilmaghani (2018) for a study of the links between religiosity and environmental philanthropy based on a nationally representative Canadian survey.

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(Beaman, 2017b; Gergen, 2015). And indeed, a complex present. In this volume, we have envisaged living well together to include engaging in world-repairing work that focuses on shared projects or ‘doing things together’.2 The binary of religion and nonreligion is blurred in this shared engagement. What we are aiming to do is to move from the narratives of loss and worry about lost moral compasses (volunteering and charitable giving), the shift in power relations that is exemplified by the sanctity of life example to the positive content of nonreligion as it is manifested in social relations with diverse constituencies that orbit around world-­ repairing work. In this context, it is entirely possible that belief and unbelief, to use the language of Lois Lee (2015) and others (Quack, 2012; Taylor, 2007a), are not obvious components of the activity. It is an oblique focus that reveals religion and nonreligion in situ, as opposed to something that lopped off from the social for examination under the microscope as a stand-alone motive or driver. This sets the stage for the example I’d like to turn to now, which hopefully illuminates the messy intertwining of religion and nonreligion. I have reported on this research in more detail elsewhere (Beaman, 2017c, 2020). The study of religion is plagued with a too narrow focus on institutional religion and belief. What people say they believe often has little resonance in their practices or the ways in which they navigate social relationships. In some measure, this over-emphasis on institutions has been corrected by the shift to studies of lived religion (Ammerman, 2007, 2020; Bender, 2003; McGuire, 2008; Orsi, 2005). The notions of lived religion and lived nonreligion capture the fluid expression of orientations toward the transcendent or the immanent. Building on this, I suggest that in this epoch of the Anthropocene and the planetary crisis that confronts us (expressed most recently, some argue, in the COVID-19 pandemic), it is those ‘off side’ spaces where people bring multiple identities to bear on something they care about, which is not explicitly religious or nonreligious, 2  This point reflects a research finding of REDCo, an international research project headed by Wolfram Weisse (2012) that explored the topic of religion and education. When participating students were asked “There are people from different religions living in every country. What do you think would help them to live together in peace?” They consistently answered: “if they do something together”. Another stream of research supports the theory that intergroup contact can improve social relations and reduce prejudice, as first proposed by Gordon Allport in the 1950s in The Nature of Prejudice (1954). See Hodson and Hewstone (2013) for a more recent elaboration on intergroup contact, including indirect forms of contact, and its ability to reduce prejudice.

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that offers the best vantage point from which to study the messy terrain of religion and nonreligion. Nonreligious and religious identities, motivations, and worldviews find expression in this space. They shape collaboration and conflict. The lay bare the problems with aligning science exclusively with nonreligion and with what Bruno Latour (2004) describes as ‘Big Science’. In an ongoing research project that focuses on sea turtle conservation, I have mapped the interstices of religion, nonreligion, science, and the ways in which they weave through human-to-human relationships as well as between humans and non-humans. I have scrutinized the discourse of activists (many of whom would not describe themselves as such) for the ways that they create relationships with others, both human and non-­ human, and for the ethical frameworks that leave traces in their conceptualization of the world around them (Ezzy, 2019). Diversity in this world is the superdiversity of Vertovec (2007, 2019), and thus, not only religion/nonreligion but also race, gender, and sexuality are all layered through the multiple relational configurations that present through face-to-face interactions in the day-to-day work of conservation, ongoing online engagement, and in-person regional meetings as well as international conferences. Geographically, sea turtle conservation is a global phenomenon. My field sites have included Australia, India, Trinidad, Cape Cod, Costa Rica, and Curacao. The two international meetings of Widecast, the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network, has brought me into contact with community activists, scientists, and program directors from 30 countries. I have attended their meetings as a participant observer and I have conducted semi-structured interviews with 35 people. The vast majority of the people I have encountered are volunteers. Most local organization directors are paid, and most scientists are attached to university-based programs of research. All are deeply passionate about sea turtles and they put their well-being at the center of their conversations with each other. I am interested in what motivates them, as well as the ways in which they articulate their understanding of the world. Working across difference, both between humans and between species, is a core focus of this research.3 I am also interested in discourses of relationship conceptualization: do ‘stewardship’, ‘dominion’, ‘equality’, ‘respect’, and 3  Mary Jo Neitz (2009, p. 357) states: “A task for us as researchers and as citizens is to encourage a politics of encounter aimed at understanding that we are not all the same, but to believe that it is possible to work together across our differences”.

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so on find voice in how those involved in sea turtle conservation talk about their work? The work of conservation is not always easy: both humans and turtles can be uncooperative and difficult to deal with. Although interpersonal issues between activists arise, my observation has been that when tensions arise, they often relate to scientific interpretation—what kind of light can be used at turtle nesting sites; how close to get to turtles as they are laying their eggs and when; is it appropriate to keep turtles in captivity to give them a ‘head start’? These questions of science are also layered by expressions of respect for the world of turtles: “turtles know turtle things”, said one volunteer on the Cape Cod turtle rescue team. In addition to concerns about populations, egg hatching variables (a current concern is with the sand temperature which determines the sex of hatchlings—global warming is negatively impacting the number of male sea turtles), and food sources, those involved in sea turtle conservation have relationships with sea turtles that seemed to impact their own ethical positions. This supports Doug Ezzy’s (2019) argument that ethics are relational. What that looks like in this context is that the people I interviewed expressed concern for not only turtles, but also other non-human animals and the natural world more broadly. They talked about how they conduct themselves in the world as a result of their involvement with sea turtle conservation, including extending their volunteer activities to include other species or to educate other humans about sea turtles. Turtle conservation work varies and depends on the location. In Cape Cod, it is primarily seasonal, involving collecting and transporting cold shocked Kemps Ridley turtles to a facility operated by the Boston Aquarium, which rehabilitates the turtles and releases them further south, outside of the geographic ‘hook’ of the Cape. This work involves night patrols of beaches and is bone chilling and sometimes dangerous. It involves a team of volunteers, the Audubon Center personnel who direct the overall operation, and scientists at both the Center and the Aquarium. One of the most popular activities of the Center is ‘necropsy day’, which attracts volunteers, community members, and scientists alike. Science acts as a common ground for volunteers and scientists to explore together the causes of sea turtle death, insight into their lives (through, e.g., examination of stomach contents for information about food and plastics consumption), and areas for improvement of understanding. At the same time, the people I’ve interviewed are deeply passionate about the work they do and emotionally connected to the turtles and their underwater world. The

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brief glimpse they have of that world through the turtles connects volunteers to their local ecologies and to nature more broadly. In Trinidad, the turtle nesting season is the busiest time of year. There the work involves monitoring nesting sites and protecting them from predators, storm surges, and human interference. The activists there have diligently and largely successfully transformed the local culture of turtle egg consumption into one of pride in protecting the turtles. They have created employment for local people through turtle protection, a crafts business that recycles beach glass into jewelry and tourism activities related to turtles. In both Trinidad and Mon Repos in Australia, education of both local and tourist groups is an integral component of the work of sea turtlers.4 This includes communicating knowledge about the disruptive impact of lights from nearby communities on nesting turtles as well as more general information like the endangered status of many sea turtle species. What does all of this have to do with religion and nonreligion? At the heart of sea turtle activism are relationships—with other volunteers, with sea turtles, with the earth and nature. These relationships engage imaginaries of the world around us and our relationship to it—dominance, stewardship, and, as evidenced by my interviews, traces of a discourse of equality and respect that signal a break from (especially) Christian frameworks for understanding the place of humans in the world.5 Many of the people I interviewed who self-describe as not religious have some connection to religious belonging. Paul, a retiree who regularly volunteers at a sea turtle nesting site in Australia, had been a (protestant) church elder at one point, but when he “saw the extent to which these so-called religious people argued I got a little bit sickened by it” and hadn’t been involved for about 20 years. With the exception of India, all of my field sites have historically been dominated by Christianity (although that narrative is complicated within each site by specificities of colonialism and particular understandings of what counts as religion). Thus, it is not surprising that 4  I have come to call the people involved in sea turtle conservation ‘sea turtlers’. They do not self-describe as conservationists, activists, volunteers, or environmentalists. 5  Few Christian writers are able to relinquish human superiority in their discussions of the environment and non-human animals. While many reject the concept of human dominion over nature, they still insist on stewardship which is a fundamentally hierarchical formulation of human/non-human animal relations. Two works which show the possibility of a Christian move away from such a hierarchy are Sarah McFarland Taylor (2007b) and Willis Jenkins (2013).

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narratives of stewardship, dominance, and hierarchies coexist, often in the same interview, with notions of equality, sharing, respect, caring, and humility.6 As Anna Salonen (2019, p. 669) has noted in her research on human consumption of non-human animals as food, notions of “dominion, stewardship and reconciliation manifest in the everyday lives of ordinary people as models for human relations with nonhuman others and the environment”. My interview with Paul illustrates the complex and sometimes contradictory narratives of sea turtlers. He described humans as being at the top of the food chain, in this way affirming human dominance over the natural world. He then noted that while we may have exacerbated climate change, we hadn’t caused it (in other words, there are forces that are powerful other than humans). He noted that fish stocks needed to be ‘managed’ in order to avoid wiping them out. Paul also, though, stressed the importance of human restraint: “we’ve got to stop the human predation of animals then I think there is a reasonable future for all the animals” (he qualified this perspective by noting that there is plenty of sheep and cattle to be bred for human consumption) and further stated that “the human race has got to start to control itself”. Paul was involved in the education activities of the nesting beach he worked at, and throughout the interview, he emphasized the importance of educating children to know the turtles. At one point, he quoted the “old Pope” who said, “give me a child from five and I’ve got a Catholic for life”. He reformulated this to his own work with children in relation to sea turtles: “show a kid at five turtles and how fascinating it is and you’ve got a turtle lover for life”. His stories of turtles blended science and respect for turtle agency, while at the same time describing turtle nesting as ‘pure instinct’ and a passionate commitment to their survival. He used the word ‘fascinating’ a number of times during the interview to describe his encounters with turtles during his volunteer work. He described with delight hatching time, especially if there are visiting groups of children. “So they come down the beach”, he said laughing, “crawl between the kids legs and go out into the water and of course they’re crawling over their feet and everywhere and generally if I’m there I crawl along down behind the last one and help them along”.

6  This is not to say that these are not themes or values taught by Christianity, but certainly equality of human and non-human animal life is not part of most Christian repertoires. At best ‘equal but different’ would characterize that relationship.

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In his reflections on the sea turtle conservation efforts he was involved in, Paul remarked that sea turtles are extremely old, and so “for us to lose them, due to the changes in the world would be indeed a shame…like I mentioned before, the greenies in the village go and criticize us because we do things but my argument is, well, we’ve done so much to make it more difficult for them…I think the little bit of help we give them is more than justified”. The “greenies” Paul refers to are people who don’t think that humans should ‘interfere’ with nature. Here we hear Paul directly contemplating his engagement with turtles and nesting activities as world-­ repairing work in which he contributes to making right damage caused by humans. We see an emerging notion of substantive equality in which humans need to make an extra effort alongside discourses of dominion and stewardship. The current global climate/environmental crisis is a major contextualizing factor for the everyday lives of human and non-human animals. It shapes the world-repairing work, including sea turtle conservation, that (non)religious people engage in, even if, like Paul, they construct narratives of diminished human responsibility for climate change itself.7 Yet, social science largely underestimates the impact of the climate crisis as a structural influence on social relations. Clifton D. Bryant made this argument about non-human animals in 1979, when he called on sociologists to account for the myriad ways non-human animals are integral to social life. As Bryant (1979, p. 471) explains: “Our social enterprise is not composed of humans alone. Creatures of all variety are inextricably involved in many of our behavioral activities and play important interactive roles in society”. More recently, Willis Jenkins (2017) has proposed a nuanced analysis of climate change vis-à-vis religion, not so much in terms of what religion should ‘do’, but the ways in which the climate crisis is reshaping religious identity, for example. World-repairing work such as turtle conservation might be considered another manifestation of the organizing power of climate change. Unlike Jenkins, however, I do not conceptualize this work and the meaning-making around it as ‘religion-like’, but rather as an articulation of a new direction that does not necessarily depend on or need to be imagined in relation to religion. 7  A limited number of responses to the environmental crisis have accounted for nonreligion. One example is that of Haydn Washington (2018), who argues that a ‘sense of wonder towards nature’ is needed to solve the environmental crisis. This feeling is inherently spiritual and can be experienced by the religious and nonreligious alike.

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This brief foray into the world of sea turtle conservation illustrates the possibilities for dealing with diversity through a repurposed transcendence: not of the godly kind (although for some this is the framework they bring to this work), rather transcendence of difference in acts of caring for co-inhabitants of this planet. The new diversity, and in particular the rise of nonreligion, has opened space for an imaginary of equality in which the human relationship with non-human animals and the world around us is in the process of being renegotiated. This renegotiation is both local and global. The common cause of sea turtle conservation requires navigation of difference at multiple levels, including religion, nonreligion, beliefs, and worldviews. As Paul (who earlier in the interview remarked how much he and his wife look forward to the three months of turtle volunteering— “we know that every Saturday night is turtles”) says: “the beauty of this group of people is there’s no sour buggers amongst them, you know? They’re all, they’re all there for a similar purposes and it’s pretty well all the same. And it’s always such a joyous experience, regardless of whether it’s been raining, hail, bowing wind or whatever, it’s still a wonderful night”.

References Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley. Altglas, V., & Wood, M. (Eds.). (2018). Bringing Back the Social into the Sociology of Religion: Critical Approaches. Brill. Ammerman, N. T. (Ed.). (2007). Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. Oxford University Press. Ammerman, N. T. (2020). Rethinking Religion: Toward a Practice Approach. The American Journal of Sociology, 126, 6–51. Beaman, L.  G. (2017a). Recognize the New Religious Diversity. Canadian Diversity, 14, 17–19. Beaman, L. G. (2017b). Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity. Oxford University Press. Beaman, L.  G. (2017c). Living Well Together in a (Non)religious Future: Contributions from the Sociology of Religion. Sociology of Religion, 78, 7–32. Beaman, L. G. (2020). The Transition of Religion to Culture in Law and Public Discourse. Routledge. Bellah, R.  N. (2011). Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Harvard University Press. Bender, C. (2003). Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver. University of Chicago Press.

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Birdsall, J., & Beaman, L. G. (2020). Faith in Numbers: Can We Trust Quantitative Data on Religious Freedom and Religious Affiliation? (Report, 22 June 2020). The Transatlantic Policy Network on Religion & Diplomacy. Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies. Brown, C.  G. (2017). Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West. Bloomsbury Academic. Bryant, C.  D. (1979). The Zoological Connection: Animal-related Human Behavior. Social Forces, 58, 399–421. Clarke, B., & Macdonald, S. (2017). Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada Since 1945. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Dilmaghani, M. (2018). Which Is Greener: Secularity or Religiosity? Environmental Philanthropy Along Religiosity Spectrum. Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, 20, 477–502. Ezzy, D. (2019). The Ethics of Pagan Ritual. Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 21, 76–99. Ganiel, G. (2016). Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity. Oxford University Press. Ganiel, G. (2019). Religious Practice in a Post-Catholic Ireland: Towards a Concept of ‘Extra-Institutional Religion’. Social Compass, 66, 471–487. Gergen, K.  J. (2015). From Mirroring to World-Making: Research as Future Forming. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 45, 287–310. Hackett, C. (2014). Seven Things to Consider When Measuring Religious Identity. Religion, 44, 396–413. Hodson, G., & Hewstone, M. (Eds.). (2013). Advances in Intergroup Contact. Psychology Press. Jenkins, W. (2013). The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity. Georgetown University Press. Jenkins, W. (2017). Feasts of the Anthropocene: Beyond Climate Change as Special Object in the Study of Religion. South Atlantic Quarterly, 116, 69–81. Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press. Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford University Press. Lövheim, M., & Stenmark, M. (Eds.). (2020). A Constructive Critique of Religion: Encounters Between Christianity, Islam, and Non-religion in Secular Societies. Bloomsbury Academic. McGuire, M. (2008). Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press. Neitz, M. J. (2009). Encounters in the Heartland: What Studying Rural Churches Taught Me about Working Across Differences. Sociology of Religion, 70, 343–361.

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Orsi, R. (2005). Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton University Press. Quack, J. (2012). Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India. Oxford University Press. Salonen, A. S. (2019). Dominion, Stewardship and Reconciliation in the Accounts of Ordinary People Eating Animals. Religions, 10, 669. Selby, J. A., Barras, A., & Beaman, L. G. (2018). Beyond Accommodation: Everyday Narratives of Muslim Canadians. UBC Press. Taylor, C. (2007a). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press. Taylor, S. M. (2007b). Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology. Harvard University Press. Thiessen, J., & Wilkins-Laflamme, S. (2020). None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada. New York University Press. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30, 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. (2019). Talking Around Super-Diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42, 125–139. Washington, H. (2018). A Sense of Wonder Towards Nature: Healing the Planet Through Belonging. Routledge. Weisse, W. (2012). Reflections on the REDCo Project. In R.  Jackson (Ed.), Religion, Education, Dialogue and Conflict: Perspectives on Religious Education Research (pp. 10–24). Routledge.

CHAPTER 11

Afterword: Towards an Understanding of Being Human Douglas Ezzy

Abstract  This chapter reviews and extends some of the arguments from the book. First, I underline the central claim that nonreligion can provide positive moral ways of living in the world. However, I caution against taking this point too far, arguing that nonreligious people are just as likely as religious people to be moral and immoral. Second, the term “lived nonreligion” shows considerable promise, drawing the focus onto human practice, performance, imaginaries, and relationships. I suggest this can be extended to include the intense emotional nonreligious experiences at dance music festivals. Finally, I consider the centrality of symbols to lived nonreligion. Symbols articulate the relationships, emotions, imaginaries, and practices that point towards the shared ineffable heart of what it is to be human. I argue that the description and analysis of these symbolic processes are at the core of the study of nonreligion.

D. Ezzy (*) University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. G. Beaman, T. Stacey (eds.), Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_11

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Keywords  Nonreligious morality • Lived nonreligion • Symbols • Emotions

Introduction What it means, in a positive constructive sense, to be nonreligious does indeed deserve more attention, and this volume goes a substantial way to providing just that. For example, Solange Lefebvre (Chap. 3 in this volume) demonstrates this aptly in her examination of the dialogue between Roman Catholics and nonbelievers after Vatican II.  Lefebvre quotes Guy Rocher from the 1970s: “unbelief is very often not a negation, but the affirmation of another faith”. And again, television producer Jean Letarte: “I object to being defined as an unbeliever. I don’t believe in the same thing, that’s all”. However, in attempting to move beyond nonreligion as the negation of religion, it is important to critically reflect on how the legacy of religion may have shaped the study of nonreligion. One of the enduring legacies of Christianity is a dualistic conception of morality. Our human frailty, fears, desires, mortality, aggression, cruelty, and greed are othered as “evil” and failure, rather than normalised as an integral part of what it is to be human. In many other pantheons around the world, the gods and goddesses are morally complex beings. They may be more powerful than humans, but they don’t always have the best interests of humans at heart, nor do they always act in ways that are morally admirable. It is wise to respect them, as one might respect a thunderstorm, but it is not always wise to obey them. In contrast, Christianity sundered a good God from an evil Satan. The Christian God’s actions are always and unquestionably good and in the interests of humans. In the past, scholars of religions have seen Christian monotheism as the pinnacle of a long evolution of religious thought (see, e.g. Underhill, 1911). In contrast, I argue that the lingering influence of Christianity on academic thought often occludes a sophisticated understanding of both religion and nonreligion. To some extent, the Christian legacy of a dualistic moral ontology is reflected in this collection’s focus on world-repairing practices and deep equality at the expense of considering nonreligious practices that are destructive and cruel. Many nonreligious people do engage in ‘worldrepairing’ work, and I applaud the study of these practices. Articulating these positive constructive aspects of being nonreligious is an important

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correction to past misunderstandings. However, equally important are the failings, and destructive practices of nonreligious people, that are also part of their imaginaries, rituals, and everyday practices. If we are to respond constructively to climate change, we need to understand both the nonreligious work of climate activists and the nonreligious imaginaries of the fossil fuel lobby. Marcus Davidsen’s (2012) penetrating, and somewhat misguided (see Ezzy, 2014), critique of contemporary Pagan studies rightly takes scholars to task for failing to engage with the racist forms of Paganism. Pagan studies scholars often focus on the positive aspects of the religion. A similar critique could be made of contemporary studies of nonreligion. At the heart of many people’s commitment to ‘religions’ is a belief (yes, a belief) that the religion is somehow ‘better’. They believe that by following the rules and practices, assenting to the doctrines, and engaging in relationships prescribed by the religion that we as humans will be ennobled. I’m not convinced by this argument. Evil and good seem to be reasonably evenly distributed amongst religious and nonreligious peoples. The Catholics had the inquisition, but the atheist Soviets had the gulags. Similarly, generosity and compassion don’t seem to be uniquely associated with religion. Yes, the churches have been deeply engaged in social services provision—schools, hospitals, and social welfare. However, some Christians in the United States, for example, are also supportive of some cruel forms of social welfare or the lack thereof. The concomitant of this belief in the moral superiority of religion has been the assumed moral bankruptcy of nonreligious people. This too is misguided. Here Lori Beaman and Timothy Stacey articulate their desire to set the record straight: “We shared a commitment to moving toward describing the positive content of nonreligion, not only at an individual level … but at the community and societal level as well” (Introduction in this volume). This is an important contribution and counters a key misconception. It is, indeed, possible to be nonreligious and moral and committed to constructive participation in community and civic society. However, once this has been articulated, I think that we need to tell a more complex story. Religion and nonreligion are not correlated in any systemic way with either ethical depravity or world-repairing activities. Certainly, religious and nonreligious imaginaries are used to justify both activities. If we are interested in the ‘positive content of nonreligion’, then the interesting problem is to understand the processes that create such positive outcomes.

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These are to be found in imaginaries, practices, emotions, and relationships that are at the core of what it means to be human. Beaman and Stacey eschew the term ‘worldviews’, preferring Charles Taylor’s term ‘imaginaries’. The power of the term imaginary, in our view, is in its ability to traverse distinctions between religious and nonreligious ways of understanding the world while avoiding thinking of either as unified systems … It is important … not to treat the imagination as if it were merely epiphenomenal. (Beaman and Stacey Introduction in this volume)

Charles Taylor (2004) defines ‘imaginaries’ in a way that does go beyond an intellectual ‘unified system’. Carried in “images, stories and legends … the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). However, as Taylor (2004, p. 3) notes, the ‘modern’ social imaginary conceives of a normative order in which “Human beings are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit”. That is to say, it retains a privileged focus on cognitive articulation of normative structures. I agree that ideas and imaginaries are not merely epiphenomenal, but we need to articulate how imaginaries, ritual actions, relationships, and emotions relate to each other as a system. Too much emphasis on ‘imaginaries’ as a concept risks falling back into a Christian metaphysics that privileges transcendence and cognition. The phrase ‘lived nonreligion’, mentioned in both the Introduction and Chap. 8, shows considerable promise. It is a wonderful way of highlighting the centrality of practice, performance, imaginaries, and relationships to what it is to be human. It turns our focus from transcendental metaphysics and ultimate beliefs to the concrete experiences of life. While lived nonreligion is certainly found in the mundane practices relating to food, I think we need to be careful not to underestimate the significance of emotionally powerful transformative experiences. That is to say, a focus on ‘lived nonreligion’ can be inclusive of experiences that might be described as mystical, awe inducing, and profound. Although it is typically not framed as ‘nonreligion’, I suggest that one interesting field of study that could be framed as ‘nonreligion’ is the study of intense emotional experiences at raves, doofs, and electronic dance music events (St John, 2004; Hutson, 2000; Tramacchi, 2000). Whether drug induced or not, the quasi-mystical experiences on the dance floor are

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not ‘religious’ in the commonly accepted sense. They do not involve systematic beliefs in transcendental beings or realms, or commitments to organised collectives, although they do involve rituals, relationships, and lived engagements (Tramacchi, 2000). Perhaps these could be called ‘lived nonreligion’? For many people something happens in the intensity of their dance-floor experiences that demands a nonreligious engagement: “When an informant claims that ‘Last night a DJ saved my life,’ it is reasonable to accept that this is ‘spiritual healing’” (Hutson, 2000, p.  46). The participants at a doof, rave, or electronic dance event would mostly not consider themselves religious, and only a few might use Hutson’s term ‘spiritual’, but many do have experiences that are profound, transformative, and perhaps mystical. What does it mean to talk about nonreligious mystical experiences? Does a nonreligious person have to use a particular discursive framing to interpret their experience for it to qualify as ‘mystical’? Evelyn Underhill (1911) provided a magisterial review of mysticism. It is notable for several reasons, not least of which is her use, in 1911, of the feminine pronoun to refer to the generic ‘mystic’. She also privileges Christianity, which is somewhat tedious, if expected for a document of that time. However, what is enlightening is her respect for the ineffability and symbolic nature of mystical experience: It is too often forgotten by quarrelsome partisans of a concrete turn of mind that at best all these transcendental theories are only symbols, methods, diagrams; feebly attempting the representation of an experience which in its fullness is always the same, and of which the dominant characteristic is ineffability. (Underhill, 1911, p. 101)

Underhill reminds us that there are parts of human experience that are inarticulable. It is this experience of ineffability that Underhill prioritises, not the transcendental metaphysics that she identifies as an imperfect symbol of these experiences. Put another way, if we have “never been modern” (Latour, 2012), what have we been? I think Latour is right to highlight the failures of ‘modernity’ to acknowledge the relationships that make so many of its successes possible. I also appreciate his analysis of how ‘belief’ in rationality enables moderns to pretend that their practices and relationships are not central to their achievements: belief is “what allows one to keep the practical form of life, in which one causes something to be fabricated, at a distance from the theoretical forms of life, in which one has to choose between facts and fetishes” (Latour, 2010, p.  20). Belief,

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including a transcendental metaphysics of belief, separates us from relationships and practices. Latour’s alternative actor-network theory can be understood as a theory of symbols: “symbols are networks of relationships, hybrids that translate or cross boundaries, and networks of meaning, emotions and social relationships” (Ezzy, 2015, p. 3). That is to say, both Latour and Underhill can be read as articulating the central role of symbols in the experience and communication of the inarticulable parts of what it is to be human. The association of the term ‘mystical’ with religious imaginaries reflects the modernist eliding of the ineffable from what it is to be human. To reclaim nonreligious mysticism is to reclaim an understanding of what it is to be human that is inclusive of ineffable experiences and the symbols, emotions, relationships, and imaginaries that articulate them. The nonreligious psychonaut on the dance floor and the religious Christian mystic in meditative trance both share an experience that is framed by imaginaries, emotions, relationships, and practices. These experiences are, at least partly, impossible to articulate in straightforward ways. Symbols, both religious and nonreligious, point towards these experiences. Symbols also articulate the relationships, emotions, imaginaries, and practices that make these experiences possible. Religious and nonreligious symbols allow us, as humans, to express an aspect of our lives that it is very difficult to examine or articulate in any other way. Similarly, art, poetry, and music, all have religious and nonreligious aspects. In this volume, the role of symbols is perhaps most clearly articulated in Anna Sofia Salonen’s chapter on food: “The ideal of sharing food with other people was deeply held and cherished in the interviews. Despite, and perhaps even because of, the delicacy of the matter, eating was considered as an important platform for forming and embedding connections with others” (Salonen in this volume). Food, and the sharing of food, is symbolic of the relationships of which people are a part. It does not typically have the emotional intensity of the psychonaut on the dance floor, but it does have similar rituals, structures, imaginaries, and relationships. Both eating together and the ecstasies of the dance floor are examples of ‘lived nonreligion’. They draw us into relational experiences, imaginaries, and emotions that symbolise the ineffable foundations of what it is to be human. Peter Beyer’s chapter seeks to identify “what nonreligion positively might be” (Beyer in this volume). Here he draws on Tylor’s work on

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animism to argue that nonreligion might be thought of as that which “bears a relation to religion” but does not involve belief in spirits: Although I do not have the space here to defend the position, I would suggest that nonreligion can also be that which bears a relation to religion, but does not include the reality or social involvement of, as Tylor put it, spiritual beings (Sharpe 1986, p.  56), more precisely such postulated agencies— whether personal or not—that interact with humans but are not centred in biological organisms. (Beyer in this volume)

This way of thinking has considerable potential. But, I’m not sure Tylor is the best source for this argument. Intriguingly, Graham Harvey (2005) argues in his book on Animism that Tylor misunderstands Indigenous animist cultures as believing in spirits. Animists, Harvey argues, do not believe in spirits. Rather, animists experience the other-than-human world as animated and relational in a very this-worldly way, which is an entirely different thing. Tylor’s misunderstanding is perhaps as a product of imposing a Christian metaphysics on the experiences of animists. Somewhat ironically, this means that animist cultures, according to Harvey’s definition, would be nonreligious cultures according to Beyer’s definition. Beyer goes on to discuss studying how nonreligious people structure their eating and sexual behaviours. “In a sense, the strategy may look like nothing more than researching worldviews or identities, and it is that to an extent. What makes it narrower than that, however, is that its aim is to look expressly at not just nonreligion, but also nonreligion in relation to religion in a context of growing nonreligion and significant controversies and conflicts regarding religion” (Beyer in this volume). This seems to me to be a very productive way of proceeding. Graham Harvey (2013) has also written a book titled Food, Sex, and Strangers that considers how the regulation of these three things is central to ‘religion’. It is the ‘strangers’ that Beyer misses in his analysis, which would have highlighted the centrality of relationality to both religion and nonreligion. As Harvey puts it: Patrick Curry … writes, “What cannot be calculated, controlled, or bought and sold is at the heart of what makes us human and makes life worth living” (Curry 2011) … In ritual and in the places (per)formed as people ritualise, imagination and reality cease to be opposites, but not because one overpowers the other. … An alternative emerges into renewed imagining of more respectful relating and simultaneously into real-world efforts to enact

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respectful human lifestyles. It is not quite that “the imaginary is transformed into the real” because religious worlds are simultaneously “at once and indistinguishably mental and social” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 251). Imagination and intimacy mix to shape selves, relations, actions and the world. (Harvey, 2013, p. 117)

Informed by Harvey’s thinking, I’d push Beyer’s point a bit further. The relation of nonreligion to religion is to be found in the way that both provide opportunities to reimagine symbols of the inarticulable aspects of life that are “at the heart of what makes us human and makes life worth living” (Harvey, 2013, p. 117). Whether one believes in spirits or not is less interesting than how a person’s symbols and imaginaries shape their relationships and actions. Put another way, I’m arguing that what religion studies scholars are interested in when they study nonreligion is not the relation of religion to nonreligion, but the relationships of both religion and nonreligion to symbols, rituals, and emotions that point to the inarticulable heart of what it is to be human. Nonreligion and those who study it are bound up in relationships that involve projecting attributes that may not, in fact, be there. This can be a constructive thing. We see echoes of religion in nonreligion, and then identify where this is simply an unjustified projection, and that they are, in fact, different. We then try to understand what the nature of the relationship between the two is: It is not difficult to recognize in everyday life what is meant by projection. It is the tendency to see in others peculiarities and ways of behaving which we ourselves display without being aware that we do. There is always at bottom a projection whenever we suffer from an excessive emotional fascination, whether of love or of hate. In other words, projection is an involuntary transposition of something unconscious in ourselves into an outer object. (Von Franz, 1975, p. 77)

Religion studies scholars who study nonreligion are still struggling to make sense of both religion and nonreligion. The relationship between the two is important, and understanding the nature of that relationship is crucial. When we assume that nonreligion can be understood in terms that limit it to its similarity to religion, we are potentially misunderstanding where nonreligion might be different and independently valuable in its

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own right. We risk projecting as yet unarticulated aspects of religion on to our understanding of nonreligion. For example, academic responses to nonreligion often reframe nonreligious actions into things that make sense from an ontology that privileges Christian assumptions and imaginaries. Christian dualistic moral ontology is a good example of exactly this process. It is very difficult to escape this received and dominant academic imaginary that was birthed and developed in an academic world that took Christianity for granted as normative. Taylor’s comments about the modern social imaginary might equally apply to an approach to nonreligion framed by Christian imaginaries: “once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one, the only one that makes sense” (Taylor, 2004, p. 17). In a broader ranging discussion of religious diversity, Linda Woodhead (2015, p. 2) highlights Lori Beaman’s “refusal to discuss diversity without also mentioning equality, and her careful dissection of apparently neutral language about ‘cultural symbols’ and ‘accommodation’ to reveal the ways in which they mask privilege, is a provocation”. We need to ask similar questions about the academic study of nonreligion and religion. The way we study them can easily mask privilege, and in particular Christian privilege, through the historical influence of Christian assumptions about the academic study of religion. These include the assumption that nonreligious people are not moral, an assumption that this collection clearly demonstrates is mistaken. However, there are other assumptions about the world, and the way we make sense of our human lives, that continue to shape the study of nonreligion. We need to keep working on these. The world feels like it is on the edge. Climate change, ecological destruction, and pandemics are reshaping our lives in profound ways. These challenges mean that understanding how humans learn to engage in respectful relationships that may be religious or nonreligious is an increasingly pressing task. These issues sit ‘behind’, so to speak, the more concrete and pressing issues that confront us. However, they are no less important. We need to understand the social processes, the symbols, imaginaries, practices, emotions, rituals, and relationships that enable us to live well in the world and that also have enabled us to live in ways that have led to such disastrous outcomes. I remain hopeful that we can do better. The research reported here is a constructive step in that direction.

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References Davidsen, M. (2012). What is Wrong with Pagan Studies? Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 24(2), 183–199. Ezzy, D. (2014). Pagan Studies: In Defense of Pluralism. Pomegranate, 16(2), 135–149. Ezzy, D. (2015). Reassembling Religious Symbols: The Pagan God Baphomet. Religion, 45(1), 24–41. Harvey, G. (2005). Animism: Respecting the Living World. Columbia University Press. Harvey, G. (2013). Food, Sex and Strangers: Redefining Religion. Acumen. Hutson, S. (2000). The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures. Anthropological Quarterly, 73(1), 35–49. Latour, B. (2010). On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Duke University Press. Latour, B. (2012). We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard university press. St John, G. (Ed.). (2004). Rave Culture and Religion. Routledge. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press. Tramacchi, D. (2000). Field Tripping: Psychedelic Communitas and Ritual in the Australian Bush. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 15(2), 201–213. Underhill, E. (1911). Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. Von Franz, M.-L. (1975). C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time. Trans. The German W. H. Kennedy. Putnam’s Sons. Woodhead, L. (2015). Religious Other or Religious Inferior? In S. Sikka, B. Puri, & L. G. Beaman (Eds.), Living with Religious Diversity (pp. 1–14). Routledge.

Index1

A Agnosticism, 32, 33 Anderson, Benedict, 4 Animals, 12, 81, 103, 105, 106, 122, 134, 135n5, 136–138, 136n6 Anthropocene, 80, 132 Apostasy, 64–69, 67n4 Atheism, 7, 26, 32, 33, 35 B Brown, Callum G., 53, 54, 129 C Capitalism, 9, 10, 82, 91, 92, 94, 95 Casamitjana, 122–124 Catholic Church, 7, 8, 35–37, 60, 62, 62n2, 65–67, 70 Catholicism in Argentina, 9

in Canada, 34, 36, 44, 45, 48, 130 in Quebec, 8, 31, 34–37, 50 Catholics for a Choice, 68 Charron, André, 35, 36 Christianity and sociology, 6, 32, 35 social impact of, 8 See also Catholic Church; Catholicism; Vatican II Council The Collective Apostasy Campaign, 9, 61, 64, 66, 70 Compartmentalisation, 91 Council, 33–35 Critical study of religion, 129 D Dedifferentiation, 92 Deep equality, 118, 119, 142 Deontology, 94

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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Differentiation, 91, 94, 104 Dis-affiliation, 54 Diversity, 11, 12, 34, 53, 62–65, 69–71, 120, 128–138, 149 E Ecosophy, 85–86 F Food consumption and connecting with others, 103, 104, 110, 111, 146 and eating animals, 103, 106 as quasi-nonreligious, 103, 104, 110, 112 Foodways, 23, 103 See also Regulation France, 32, 78, 79 H Humanism, 7, 26, 86 I Imaginaries, 2–9, 11–13, 31, 32, 37, 38, 53, 60–71, 78, 86, 87, 91–93, 131, 135, 138, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149 Indifference, 32, 33, 102, 109, 111 K Kant, 94 L Lee, Lois, 2, 20, 21, 61, 93, 102, 103, 110, 132

Lived nonreligion, 11, 102, 103, 111, 112, 132, 144–146 Lived religion, 63, 132 M Modernity, 10, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 91, 97, 145 N Nature, 5, 7, 10, 11, 22, 26, 79–81, 83, 85–87, 93, 119, 135, 135n5, 137, 137n7, 145, 148 conceptions of, 79 human relations with, 12, 136, 138 Nonbelief, 32, 35–37 Nones, 8, 9, 11, 20, 23, 30, 31, 33–37, 50, 53, 95, 131 Nonreligion growth of, 26 positive content of, 7, 9, 22, 91, 103, 132, 143 relational theories of, 7, 20–26 study of, 6–13, 26, 30–38, 111, 120, 142, 149 and world-repairing in law, 118–124 No religion, 31, 46, 48, 50, 52–54, 103 No religious affiliation, 48–53 census enumeration of (Canada), 53 P Practice, 3–7, 10–13, 20, 24–26, 31, 63–65, 78, 85, 87, 90–97, 102–106, 119, 121, 122, 124, 129, 132, 142–146, 149 Prefigurative, 97 Protestant bias, 4 denominations in Canada, 46, 48, 50

 INDEX 

Q Quack, Johannes, 20, 21, 61, 62, 132 Quebec, 8, 31, 34–37, 44, 78 R Rawls, 94 Regulation of abortion, 60 of foodways, 23 of life passages, 22, 23 of sexuality, 23 Reproductive rights, 64, 70, 71 Rocher, Guy, 35, 36, 142 Roman Catholic Church, 62n2, 65 S Secular, 9, 10, 21, 56, 60, 61, 66, 70, 71, 78, 91, 103 Secularism, 61, 63, 71 Sedlock, 122–124 Serviatus, 121n2, 122–124, 124n3 Sexuality, 3, 9, 23, 26, 64, 68, 70, 71, 133 See also Regulation Spiritual but not religious, 9, 24, 78 Statistics Canada, 30, 31, 51, 56, 130

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T Taylor, Charles, 4, 53, 87, 132, 144, 149 Transmodernity, 84, 86 U Ultimate meaning, 10, 11, 13 of practice, 10, 13, 90–97 Ultramodernity, 79 Unaffiliated, 63, 64, 66 Unbelief, 7, 8, 31, 32, 34–37, 109, 132, 142 United States (US), 11, 20, 79, 122, 143 V Vatican II Council, 32 Veganism, 23, 119, 119n1, 122 W Weber, Max, 22 World repairing, 2, 4–13, 91–93, 97, 118–124, 131, 132, 137, 142, 143