Category Archives: University of Stirling

Questioning ‘the global resurgence of religion’

30 Monday May 2011

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Scott M. Thomas has been widely praised for his book The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (NY & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005). This is an ambitious book with many potentially fertile ideas. In his chapter in Fabio Petito & Pavlos Hatzopolous (eds.) Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile, (NY & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Thomas makes an interesting attempt to historically problematize the category of religion, with the added virtue of drawing on the insights of critical scholars from other disciplines, such as Talal Asad (2003:47), John Bossy (2003:47) and William T. Cavanaugh (2003:27) to name only a few. Referring to “the modern invention of religion”, he suggests that “[a]t issue is the meaning of religion in early modern Europe, and how we understand religion today” (2003:25).  He refers to “the invention of religion as part of the rise of western modernity” (2003:28). He notices, I think rightly, that “the rise of the modern state is the other part of the story…” (2003:27). He claims that

Most scholars of early modern Europe now recognise that the confusion over the role of religion and other political and socio-economic forces in the debate on the Wars of Religion was based on retrospectively applying a modern concept of religion – as a set of privately  held doctrines or beliefs – to societies that had yet to make this transition (2003:25).

That the author’s aim seems to be a radical and critical questioning of the ideological functions of the religion and secular politics binary and much else that hangs on it appears to be made clear in the opening paragraph of the first chapter of his book:

The concept of religion was invented as part of the political mythology of liberalism and now has emerged as a universal concept applicable to other cultures and civilizations. This understanding of religion is used to legitimate a form of liberal politics that considers the mixing of politics and religion to be violent and dangerous to reason, freedom, and political stability  (2005:21).

Unfortunately Thomas continues the paragraph ambiguously, as though he is not quite sure whether or not he wants to critique the category of religion or simply make statements about religion as though religion had some objective existence in the world. Repeating the expression in his title, he continues:

The global resurgence of religion, however, challenges the concepts of social theory that interpret public religion in this way. It challenges the idea that secular reason can provide a neutral stance  from which to interpret religion, and it opens up the possibility of multiple ways of being ‘modern’, making ‘progress’, or being ‘developed’… (2005:21)

The radical pronouncements that appear here and there suggest that Thomas is concerned with the challenge that problematizing ‘religion’ as a category implies for IR as a ‘secular’ discipline – a problem because if religion is a modern invention, as I think he rightly argues in places, then not only IR but everything that is conventionally (and juridically) placed in that category is logically and discursively dependent on ‘religion’ for its conceptualization. Thomas acknowledges the implications of this insight for the wider academy and much else (2005:17).

But for most of the book, far from treating ‘religion’ as a rhetorical invention with a crucial part to play in the “mythology of liberalism”, and far from critiquing an understanding of ‘religion’ that constructs it as a real and present danger to liberal reason and freedom, Thomas energetically re-inscribes the category along with its ideological binary ‘secular liberalism’ as a fundamental organizing principle of his book. Even in the paragraph just quoted, Thomas moves from saying “The concept of religion was invented as part of the political mythology of liberalism” to referring only two sentences later to “The global resurgence of religion”, as though there could be any such thing.

The author stays safely within the well-worn discursive conventions of the “mythology of liberalism” that he also wants to critique, and in this way contributes to the rhetoric on religion and its implicit distinction from secular reason. I would suggest that his position remains unresolved because the conclusions he must draw are too radical. Too much is at stake. For the problem of the retrospective application of a modern concept “as a set of privately held doctrines or beliefs” set apart from the non-religious state and so on, ineluctably implies the problem of the retrospective application of these other modern reified concepts such as “socio-economic forces” which the modern concept of religion has made possible. If the modern secular state has, as in my view the author would be right to argue, depended for its conceptualization on the related concept of religion as a private right of faith in unseen mystical powers separated from the state, then so have those modern discourses which construct “political and socio-economic forces”.

Churches, marriage and same-sex relationships…

22 Sunday May 2011

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This week, the Church of Scotland will be discussing a specially commissioned report on Same Sex Relationships and the Ministry at its General Assembly in Edinburgh. Essentially, it will be seeking to reconcile the unavoidable fact that a number of its clergy live in gay relationships they’d prefer to acknowledge openly, with its public and theological position on sexuality.

The Churches face a problem of course. Whilst our civil institutions become ever more scrupulous about anything that could constitute an obstacle to the legitimate aspirations of gay people, they remain guardians of a tradition steeped in patriarchal structures and heteronormative metaphors that raise – for those they marginalise – deeply painful issues concerning authority, identity and belonging.

In the context of much larger questions concerning the global capitalist exploitation of our environment or our failure to eradicate material poverty or even to ensure everyone has access to clean water, it is perhaps not surprising to find many people – both outside and inside the Christian community – impatient with such a ‘non-issue’. The question of whether it is right to ordain a man or woman who seeks to live openly in a stable, supportive same sex relationship seems irrelevant to the big questions. But, of course it is a significant point, touching as it does on the ordering of human relationships; a fundamental question of great moment in any society. In the United Kingdom and large parts of the western world, Christianity has provided the framework for domestic and sexual relationships for hundreds of years in such a way that, until very recently, people have really not had to give it much thought. Though critics from Harriet Taylor and J S Mill in the 19th century onwards have called marriage a form of female slavery, it has remained the default domestic position. More recently, legislation has loosened the bonds of women, taken away male prerogatives and allowed for an increase in non Church weddings, contenting itself with the more neutral territory of registration but, until now, civil society has not suggested anything substantially different from what the Church has itself prescribed. Recently, attending a lovely family wedding at a registry office in London, I was struck by how far this wedding followed the pattern of the Church weddings I’ve attended – it was a life-long, exclusive partnership in which reference was made to having and raising children. There were rings, bouquets, bridesmaids, a best man and photographers.

Yet In spite of the ritual similarities between registry office weddings and Church weddings, there are differences of course. Churches refer to ‘holy matrimony’ and seek to give significance to heterosexual relationships in very particular ways, claiming, for example, that it has been ‘instituted of God’ (Canon 31:1 of the Scottish Episcopal Church, or set up ‘for a remedy against sin’ (Book of Common Prayer, 1662). It is in the words of the canons of the Church of England, “…according to our Lord’s teaching … a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman, to the exclusion of all others on either side, for the procreation and nurture of children, for the hallowing and right direction of the natural instincts and affections, and for the mutual society, help and comfort which the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.” (Canon B 30).

Arguably, then, marriage as it exists across most of the western world today is still thoroughly bound up in a specific vision of social relations that might or might not be exclusively Christian in origins but which have been thoroughly Christianised. This prescribed form of human relating brings together sex, property and children under a heading of heterosexual – and thus, historically at least, hierarchical – partnership, and promotes this as the premier form of mutual human support. Other potentially supportive relations, including same-sex partnerships are bracketed off as, at best, insignificant and at worst, a matter for shame and guilt.

Yet Christian churches clearly can change as new priorities emerge. In Sweden, for example, a proposal first brought forward in 2003, that marriage should be open to same sex couples was initially rejected by the Central Board of the Lutheran Church of Sweden on the traditional grounds that it could only denote a relationship between a man and a woman. In 2009, however, the Theological Committee of the Church changed its view and recommended that gay couples should be allowed to marry and that priests of the Lutheran Church of Sweden could perform such weddings in their churches (see Svenskakyrkan Church Synod Liturgy Committee report 2009:2 Wedding and Marriage).

The Lutheran Church of Sweden was, of course, responding to pressure– to the changing legal position in Sweden on marriage as a civil institution. It courts criticism from Christians who believe there is a deeper or eternal order existing beyond the realm of changeable human being – beyond changes implemented in response a secular government to reflect its secular concerns – to which biblical language and the traditions of the Church point. Yet Christian theology and Church order have been marked from the beginning by manifestly human heteropatriarchal social structures, inherited from the cultural milieu of the early Christian Church. Moreover, in taking such a radical step the Swedish Church has arguably put itself in a good position to act as a positive force in society, underpinning and supporting trusting relationships rather than undermining them. This too is surely something that could be aligned with the Gospel – perhaps with its refusal to make idols out of conventional family ties and responsibilities.

Patriarchy, Patrimonialism – and Paradigm Change

08 Sunday May 2011

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Following some years in so-called early-retirement it was with much interest that I nervously ventured out once again to a mainstream academic conference: that of the Sociology of Religion Research Group of the British Sociological Association held at Easter in the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham. This BSA Group used to be a familiar stamping ground for me, and so I wondered how the sub-discipline would have fared since my last attendance five years before. Of course I also wanted to catch up with where things were now at, given not only the disputed increased salience and ambiguities of the religious factor in the world system, but also, not least, to observe what impact the substantial and unprecedented investment made through the Religion and Society Research Programme supported by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with its £18 million budget might have made.

It has been apparent for at least the past fifteen years that what one might call the traditional sociology of religion exemplified most notably in a series of textbooks and monographs built around an array of recurrent basic concepts has faced a crisis. Of the latter thought patterns, the long drawn-out careers of the theory of secularisation and debates on the meaning of the term ‘religion’ are the most prominent. The slow but inevitable dying away of the pre-modern residua of religion in the inhospitable normality of rational scientific modernity charted in the theory of secularisation might remind readers with a poetic cast of mind of Matthew Arnold’s famous lines:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Those who have long memories may also recall the postmodern theologian Don Cupitt’s melancholic, grainy image in the Sea of Faith television series when he followed in the footsteps of Jesus and David Friedrich Strauss, and, somewhat lugubriously, announced his nocturnal presence in the Garden of Gethsemane. What this (post-) theologian also acknowledged in the poet was the threat of the unknown, a continuing presence of the irrational,

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Anyone involved in the study of religion, be they theologian, poet, critical scholar in the humanities, or indeed social scientist might well recognise that the retreating tide, with its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ can now be seen as more like the retreat of the sea to the horizon that precedes the onset of a tsunami that carries much before it.

In face of this ‘resurgence of religion’ in the course of the last decade of the twentieth century Roland Robertson and Peter Beyer advanced the theory of globalisation and the ‘glocal’ matrix as the key components of a new ‘paradigm’ with which to challenge the persisting but apparently faltering theory of secularisation. The latter was regarded by them as incapable of explaining the increased salience of the religious factor and the apparent reflexivity of religious collectivities as they responded to global pressures. In his famous, controversial and influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1961), Thomas S. Kuhn argued that ‘normal’ science did not proceed thorough a smooth accumulation of objective evidence but could be subject to a crisis created by anomalies that would eventually bring about the collapse of a comprehensive theory and its displacement by a new ‘paradigm’. Was the same true of the theory of secularisation, and could globalisation theory effect such a displacement?

In my judgement there are problems associated with Robertson and Beyer’s advocacy of globalisation theory in that the ‘middle axioms’ that might make sense of the intermediate connections between the level of ‘grand theory’ (and theories do not come much grander than that of globalisation) and the contingent specificity of any given locale are not that obvious. Thus Beyer made use of the concept of ‘communication’ central to Niklaas Luhmann’s systems theory, and defines ‘religion’ in terms of it being communication, rather in the way that the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher made the feeling of ‘absolute dependence’ the category out of which to construct an entire experiential and theological architectonic. In short, however, Robertson and Beyer are in my judgement correct in attributing determinative significance to globalisation, but how this might be worked through in a satisfactory way is less than obvious.

The conference at Birmingham had a packed schedule and there was a rich diversity of short papers on a wide range of topics. There were three plenary and clearly definitional sessions respectively addressed by equally distinguished speakers. The first was the Scot, Professor Steven Bruce, the second the English (and European) sociologist Professor Grace Davie, and third the British/Australian Professor Bryan Turner. The question of national identity has itself become more salient as the nations of the United Kingdom move in the direction of individual self-determination, and the three speakers refracted this dimension and their awareness of their own individual social backgrounds in a number of ways.

Professor Bruce is a combative figure who throughout his career has trenchantly defended the secularisation tradition established by his mentor the late Bryan Wilson of the University of Oxford. At the BSA Conference Bruce once more re-asserted his position as a consistent scientific positivist, and pointedly excluded as basically irrelevant ‘normative theory’, ‘zeitgeist metaphors’, any extraneous ‘agenda-setting theory’ and feminist sociological insights, as opposed to the correct path of ‘sociological explanation’ to be applied to the study of religion. Professor Davie is a skilled practitioner of via media, and rather than confront Bruce she presented a positive (as opposed to a positivist) report as she highlighted the values of diversity in topics, theory and method apparent in the present-day sociology of religion in Britain. This emollient approach was indeed advisable as aspirant researchers availed themselves of the beneficence of the AHRC, a largesse that may well be unrepeatable; consequently we should think carefully before we bite the hand that feeds us. As a sociologist of renown, Professor Turner has had exceptionally wide international experience and he focused upon the topic of charisma, because unlike the positivist empiricist Bruce and the positively eclectic Davie, Turner would appear to have an enduring – even a personal – relationship with the core subject matter of religion, which on this occasion he identified with ‘charisma’. All three contributions were in their various ways controversial, but in the discussions that followed the interchanges were muted. Why, might one ask was this the case? How might we understand this relatively subdued atmosphere?

In the peace-promoting surroundings of Woodbrooke there was a strong sense that the sub-discipline of the sociological study of religion has reinforced its boundaries as a quasi-autonomous niche culture within the wider sociological field. Despite this, there are considerable questions that remained for the most part submerged. For example, whilst the ‘spiritual revolution’ was frequently mentioned but dismissed on the basis that the active spiritual subjects in Heelas and Woodhead’s Kendal Project only represented a tiny minority (according to Professor Bruce this was only 0.8% of the population), the tacit assumption that quantity should be equated with societal significance was never questioned. Such an assumption would make the terrorist an irrelevance. Globalisation and the global/local (‘glocal’) problematic was completely marginal. International political and cultural violence intensified by religious zealotry was likewise at the periphery of conference concerns whereas this is a matter of global importance. Clearly something was taking place that prevented anything really interesting from happening.

In conclusion, I invite you to imagine that we are beside a waterhole in the savannah amongst lions – and other animals standing at a respectful distance. The sombre tone of Sir David Attenborough’s voice can be heard as he comments quietly on the ethology of the animals we observe. A great grizzled lion who has banished many a rival continues to ensure the survival of his genes (and memes) by the elimination or cowing into silence of all opposition. The patriarch’s message is this: lions do not cultivate or eat vegetables; they do not eat fruit; they do not manufacture food; they hunt animals and eat meat alone: the true lion is a carnivore. A noble lioness, the matriarch that has born many cubs lies sunning herself at the other side of the waterhole. She knows that once roused the female is deadlier than the male, and so she keeps her counsel and lets her cubs down to the water’s edge to drink. All the other lions, young and old, know that the waterhole will soon dry up and so they likewise keep their growls to themselves. Another venerable master lion on the periphery stalks slowly forward and ventures to observe that lions should eat authentic wild meat and not factory-farmed animals. He then quietly walks off and away back to own far distant waterhole. The patriarch and the matriarch are meanwhile content. In ethological and social-psychological terms we can see that the patriarch and matriarch enjoy ‘sphere dominance’. Wisely, however, they know that they do not enjoy or aspire to ‘full spectrum dominance’, as this rightly belongs to a higher species that only very occasionally visits the oasis. Yet the future of the waterhole – and of the lions – depends upon the ideas and the behaviour of the higher species who understand the ecology that comprises both. The lions are meanwhile content to sun themselves until the hunt for the next meal. When, where, and in what form a Kuhnian ‘crisis’ might come that re-imagines some of the critical issues the BSA conference seemed unable to address is unclear, though simply continuing to lie in the sunshine and drink at the waterhole filled by AHRC largesse is not a long-term option.

The murder of Osama bin Laden – the end of the beginning of the clash of civilisations?

02 Monday May 2011

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This morning I awoke to the news that Osama bin Laden was dead, murdered by the United States of America in a what appears to have been a heavily fortified compound in Pakistan; more precise details will no doubt emerge over time. The news is currently being presented in such a way as to suggest capture, not death, was the objective, though whether that was in any way realistic is open to serious debate: surely resistance was expected, and so the statement that bin Laden ‘did resist the assault force’ should come as no great surprise.

Although bin Laden was regarded as significant in many western policy circles, serving as a very useful oppositional figure (and one we will no doubt see replaced in a short time), he was not highly regarded by most Muslims, who saw his understanding of Islam as being no less abhorrent than many Christians’ perspectives of Hitler’s understanding of Christianity. His significance lay in substantial measure in his elevation to a position as ‘super-terrorist’ by US Presidents Clinton, Bush (the Lesser) and Obama on the one hand, and every self-serving dictator claiming to be an ally of the USA-led actions against ‘international terror’ on the other: indeed, one might reasonably argue that bin Laden was emboldened by all the attention he received.

In substantial part this way of thinking about bin Laden arose from a racist strand of thought that was articulated in American neoconservative thinktanks, represented most publicly in two different though related books: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Fukuyama has since distanced himself a little from his thesis, though he is still firmly in the neoconservative camp).  Huntingdon’s book in particular has been influential well beyond its literary or intellectual merit. His thesis of distinct civilisational or religious blocs – one of them being Islam – that were in competition or even war with one another dominated Bush’s administration, in particular as it suited his own simplistic dualism of good and evil struggling against each another. Although strenuously denied by Obama and especially by his immediate supporters, this kind of thinking has continued without change, albeit in more nuanced form, as the ‘drone war’ amply illustrates.

This thinking is not confined to conservative thinktanks and policy-makers, however, as the cheering crowds outside the White House celebrating bin Laden’s murder demonstrate. There is clearly no understanding of bin Laden’s significance or otherwise beyond American (and to a lesser extent, European) interests, and the conflation of his thinking into ‘fundamentalist Islam’ (as Tony Blair and others called it) simply highlights the paucity of intelligent reflection and comment (for a better assessment, the Independent’s Robert Fisk offers careful engagement with bin Laden and his changing thought in The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East). In fact, bin Laden’s death is largely irrelevant to most Muslims in the Middle East and South East Asia, beyond perhaps removing a stigma that had become attached to idea of Islam – this is how we can read the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s statement that bin Laden’s death has removed one of the causes of violence in the world. Bin Laden was not a cleric, had no formal training in Islamic law, spoke for no government, no substantial movement and had few followers: it is hard to underestimate his irrelevance to most Muslims, who might have agreed with his assessment of the cause of problems faced by Muslims, but disagreed with his proposed methodology for dealing with these problems, as Tony Karon has argued.  In so far as localised movements used or use the al Qaida name, whether in Iraq, in the Arabian Peninsula or elsewhere, it was and is always as part of a nationalist or irredentist movement, riding on the coat-tails of a wealthy supporter of attacks against a perceived enemy of Islam. As the name itself suggests (it translates simply as ‘the base’), people don’t really ‘join’ al-Qaida, they simply adopt the name if it suits them at that particular moment in time.

And that is a key issue: these nationalist movements will not go away unless some meaningful compromise or agreement can be reached on issues they are addressing. We might not sympathise with their modes of engagement, but their causes are often at least partially legitimate. None of this is about what we might think of as ‘religion’ in the sense of Islam being a key issue: these are struggles over land, rights, political engagement, freedom and the like, though they may be presented as being about Islam by some. Even bin Laden saw nationalist struggles as significant: one of his most important early demands was the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia (he saw this as a violation of the land of Mecca and Medina, the two foremost holy cities in Islam), and his aim of defeating America in the same way (he claimed) he had defeated the Soviet Union was at least in part about liberating Muslims from American influence.

So if Americans and Europeans now think that they can begin to relax over the prospect of ‘international terror’, they are very mistaken. US policy in particular is catastrophically misaligned in the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia (where the majority of the world’s Muslims live), proclaiming democracy, whilst propping up regimes that clearly only serve US interests rather than the interests of the people of these countries. For those who hitherto refused to see this reality it has been made very clear over the last year, with two key factors playing a role: the first is Wikileaks and the unprecedented insight into US-policy making it offers, and the second is the ‘Arab spring’, as al-Jazeera elegantly calls the uprisings across the Middle East. Bin Laden was a minor, irrelevant issue in this context: he had not commented significantly on any of the current issues, had not engaged in any noticeable way with the rebellions, and so his murder, whilst perhaps a satisfying act of violent revenge for Americans, serves no useful or meaningful purpose in resolving these wider global conflicts.

After all, US and European policies towards Muslim-dominated countries in the Middle East and South East Asia are unlikely to change simply because bin Laden is now dead, and so rather than this really being the end, this is more likely to be the end of the beginning. So long as Americans and Europeans continue to think in simple dichotomies of good (us) and evil (them), advanced (us) and primitive (them), having rights (us) and threatening our rights (them), and so on, the ‘clash of civilisations’ will continue. Huntingdon thought he was describing a reality, when in fact he was describing a choice – in classic Marxist/Leninist terms we can see this as an ideologically-driven reversal of cause and effect designed to preserve existing systems of dominance. When viewed through a Fukuyama/Huntingdon lens, religion, culture, civilisations all become more important categories of analysis than they deserve to be in the wider struggle for rights, self-determination and freedom. If US and European policy continues to follow a doctrinaire view of the world as split into competing or warring blocs based on misappropriated understandings of religions, civilisations and cultures – note the plurals – rather than understanding the hybridity and connectedness underpinning our world, continuing conflict and equivalent resistance is assured.  Sometimes that resistance will take the form of so-called acts of terror. Whether the tears of an Afghan mother or father mourning the death of a child in a drone attack ‘defending American freedom’ are worth the same as the tears of an American mother or father mourning the death of a child in an attack on ‘imperialist invaders’ is an active choice we make. We can make that choice and we can vote for governments that make that choice, but if we choose to prioritise our needs, our understanding of culture, religion or civilisation, then we must always expect that others will contest that. Murdering bin Laden does not help with these choices, rather it is simply more of the same: unless we make choices that subvert the dominant paradigm propogated by those that determine our countries’ foreign policy, this might just be the end of the beginning, rather than the beginning of the end of the clash of civilisations.

Sport, Politics and Religion

18 Monday Apr 2011

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This blog posting comes from Colette Gilhooley, who is writing her MLitt in Postcolonial Studies under Professor David Murphy.

A combination of International Women’s Day and the anticipation of the Olympics may make this an opportune time to look at issues facing female athletes which have come to my attention recently. It has been said that Pierre de Coubertin ‘revived the Olympic Games as an instrument of reconciliation, [yet] his successors as president of the International Committee have been tireless in their insistence that ‘politics’ should not interfere with sport’ (Guttmann, 2003: 372). The Olympic Games are an opportunity for people to demonstrate their sporting abilities and to represent their countries on an international stage and their identities as part of that culture which may, I would argue, include politics. Allen Guttmann has called attention to the link made by writers between economic systems and modern sports, suggesting that ‘modern sports are an example of Weberian instrumental rationality, a subtle means of social control’ (Guttmann, 2003: 374). If this is the case, then perhaps it is not surprising that some women’s sports have been given less coverage than others, reflecting how traditionally women have had less economic opportunities than their male counterparts. ‘Sports are the mirror image of – rather than an emancipatory alternative to – the repressive, exploitative, achievement-orientated world of work’ (Guttmann, 2003: 374). While one can acknowledge that sports are part of a cultural and economic system which could be argued to be ‘repressive’, I would like to suggest that the work of Florence Ayisi suggests an alternative to this idea.

In 2007 Florence Ayisi made a film called Zanzibar Soccer Queens which is a documentary following a group of female footballers who are ‘a team of strong-willed women determined to better their lives and define new identities through playing football. In the interviews on the film some of the men expressed their concerns regarding the tension of the football strips the women wear and the traditions of women’s dress code within a predominantly Islamic culture. ‘The problem with women wearing shorts and exposing their bodies is that when men are watching they can be tempted,’ explains Abdallah Mzee, Koran School teacher. The problem seems to be the male gaze and the association of football and certain sports as being predominantly male.

Allen Guttmann (2003) states that in the sexual politics of modern sports, ‘women have refused to be content with conventionally feminine sports (like tennis) and have ‘intruded’ into traditionally male sports (like rugby)’ (Guttmann, 2003: 370).  He further suggests that if male sports have traditionally been an area in which to demonstrate the masculine ‘physical prowess’, then women doing these sports should also, ideally, result in the opportunity for women to demonstrate their physical prowess; however, Guttmann notes that this is not the case (Guttmann, 2003: 370).

Guttmann argues that the ‘sexual politics’ in modern sport is among other things about the transition between the conventional sports played by genders and women breaking these traditional boundaries (Guttmann, 2003: 370). Mr Msoma, Chairman of Sports Council Zanzibar, states that there are some understandings, which seem to be predominantly psychological issues and misunderstood ideas, regarding barring women’s participation in sports which the authorities are struggling to deal with in Zanzibar. Playing football allows the women the opportunity to transcend traditional gender boundaries of their culture and redefine their identities using football as a way to do this. Warda, a midfielder of the football team, has contrasted religion and football demonstrating the importance of both influences in her life: ‘When playing football you can say anything, but when praying you have to say what you have been told by God’. By contrasting religion and football, Warda is able to demonstrate the freedom she feels as an individual on the soccer pitch where she is able to speak for herself, compared to the set performative practices which are part of her religion. Although some women have been discouraged from playing football, many of them see football as a therapeutic influence which has helped them to deal with the traumas in their lives. Furthermore, it has provided them with positive opportunities including the chance to travel and learn, which will help them to break free from the oppressive patriarchal influence inherent in their culture: ‘Unveiling their soccer dreams is evidence of social change and personal development, emancipation and empowerment through sports’.

While sport can be empowering, it is not without its dangers, particularly when there is an association between sports and cultural identity. Eudy Simelane was captain and midfielder of South Africa’s women’s soccer team Banyana Banyana. Simelane was a Lesbian feminist activist who was raped and killed in 2008 by members of her town because of her sexuality. At the time the state did not recognise the practice of ‘Corrective Rape’ (an attempt to punish and change somebody’s sexuality through rape) or rapes that were the result of hate crimes against the homosexual community. Through her work, Simelane was able to try and combine politics and sport and raise awareness of women’s rights by being the first openly lesbian football player in South Africa.

Many of the reasons given in the interviews against homosexuality seem to be connected to religious or cultural reasons, including the threat to the traditional cultural understanding of genders and the performative roles that go with them. Homosexuality has been described as being ‘Unafrican‘ and not part of South African culture; however, this can lead to questions on the nature of what ‘Culture’ consists of and who has the authority to decide.

Jody Kollapen, Former Chair of the South African Human Rights Commission has described culture as being ‘dynamic, our cultures have evolved over thousands of years and therefore culture has to keep up to date’. Sport and culture are, indeed, very closely linked, and I think it would seem like a missed opportunity for the Olympic Games and sport to not engage with political aspects of culture. Sport is a platform for opportunity for attention to be brought to cultural issues, such as in the case of Eudy Simelane and the very real concerns facing female athletes ability to realise and perform their identities through sports.

(Guttmann, Allen, 2003. Sport, Politics and the Engaged Historian, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 363-375. New Delhi.)

Francesca’s Buried Biblical Treasures

04 Monday Apr 2011

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BBC 2’s series, The Bible’s Buried Secrets is a familiar – and in many ways, winning – combination of middle eastern street scenes, archaeological digs, panoramic shots of Jerusalem and the golden Dome of the Rock, and computer animated reconstructions.  Its writer and presenter, Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou of Exeter University’s Department of Theology and Religion, is young, personable and enthusiastic, and the whole production is good-looking enough to make viewers feel, occasionally, as if they’ve stumbled into an advertisement for the holiday of a life-time.

This is not to underestimate Stavrakopoulou’s academic credentials.  She has many fascinating, well-researched ideas about the Bible.  In a recent episode, she suggested that the stories of creation and more especially, the Garden of Eden might be based on an actual historical event – and specifically not the creation of the world!  She suggested, cross-referencing relevant archaeological findings, that the Garden of Eden might have been the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, whose intricate interior designs she likened to a kind of virtual garden.  The so-called ‘fall’ – the Genesis account of the first couple’s disobedience and exclusion from the garden – could perhaps then be the fall of an ancient near eastern King of Judah.  Arguably, this precursor of the Hebrew Bible’s first human creature, Adam, was a historical individual who seemed to consort with the gods and goddesses in the holy temple garden but  who had in fact failed, because of personal greed, to maintain the terms of a very real vassalage to the imperial powers of the day, and thereby brought ruin and destruction – divine wrath and expulsion – on himself and his people as a result.

These are intriguing thoughts – of course – but perhaps not as controversial as some of the promotional material would have it.  Although Stavrakopoulou’s theories about the Temple in Jerusalem, for example, offer us a different slant on a familiar biblical text, the approach as a whole differs little from the methodologies of the so-called Higher Criticism, calling for attention to the historical and linguistic contexts of the bible and the need for the kind of critical examination previously only applied to other kinds of books.  Certainly, in the 19th century, professors and academics sometimes lost their jobs for proposing, for example, that the Bible’s stories might have had something in common with stories of other gods and goddesses.  But it would be unlikely for this to happen today.

What is perhaps more provoking, is Stravrakopoulou’s suggestion that we might be able to liberate ourselves from the huge burden of guilt and human sinfulness imposed on us by Christian readings of Genesis 2-3, if we accepted her interpretation instead.  Telling stories is one way to normalise or universalise what is actually culturally specific.  Using the Genesis 2-3 story to make women carry the guilt for the ‘fall’ or radical sinfulness of the entire human race, is a case in point.  There are many instances of Christian theologians, poets and writers over the centuries who have drawn misogynistic meanings out of this story and, quite clearly, Stravrakopoulou’s research would not actively support these readings.  It’s more doubtful however, whether her theories really help us to come to a positive consensus on human nature.

Of course some Christians remain convinced of a more literal truth to the story of the Garden of Eden – Stravrakopoulou spoke to one or two of them and they were predictably unmoved.  However, many people who have spent time reading the Bible over the last 200 years or so, have been well aware of its gaps, contradictions, lack of empirical verifiability and perhaps even its  indebtedness to traditions mainstream Churches or theologians would pronounce as beyond the pale.  They remain intrigued; hooked, nonetheless, by these problematic Biblical accounts of ambivalent human hope and fleeting divine epiphanies.  Arguably it is these, essentially unanswerable but fertile questions that remain the Bible’s real buried treasure.

A polemic on the World Interfaith Harmony Week

28 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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On 26.10.2010, the United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously to create World Interfaith Harmony Week, a resolution first proposed by King Abdullah II of Jordan, who, together with his brother Prince Hassan, has long been a proponent of such things, partly also for domestic political reasons.  The first week of February has been designated as World Interfaith Harmony Week, to be marked around the world, with governments encouraged to support and promote the aims and objectives of this week.

But I think there is a fundamental problem here: I don’t think there is or can be any such thing as interfaith (or interreligious) dialogue.  I do not, of course, have any objection to the creation of a week dedicated to greater harmony in the world.  Nobody could really deny the merits of increasing harmony between people and peoples on personal and global levels: after all, the problems of sexism, racism, war etc. are all around us, and indeed, often seem to overwhelm us.  The problem here lies with the ‘interfaith’ element.  Of course, there can be dialogue between individuals who might describe themselves in particular faith terms.  But whilst acknowledging that there are differences between the terms ‘faith’ and ‘religion’, and that what 10 or 20 years ago used to be ‘interreligious dialogue’ is now ‘interfaith dialogue’ (and I caricature only slightly here!), I want to argue that the premises of such dialogue as ‘interfaith dialogue’ do not stand up to substantial critical scrutiny.

Tracing the usage of the term ‘religion’ over the centuries, we can see it changing in different contexts.  For example, in the Catholic/Protestant West, we can point very broadly (and, admittedly, rather simplistically) to changes in understanding over recent centuries:

  1. initially seen as being Christian (having religion) OR being apostate (not having religion), this changed with colonialism to
  2. an understanding of religion predicated upon a different form of normativity and closely connected to racism: people were either religious (Christian or some other – generally ‘inferior’ – recognised form of belief that western Christians considered to be in some way similar to their understanding of Christianity; the ‘creation of Hinduism’ being a perfect example of this, as scholars such as Geoffrey Oddie have discussed), OR they were superstitious or heathen (their practices were not understood by western missionaries and colonialists; so-called ‘African traditional religions’ are a perfect example of this), on to
  3. a more contemporary ideological understanding of many religions, of which Christianity is but one amongst equals, alongside the so-called ‘other great religions of the world’.

The main problem with this understanding is that it equates an essentialised understanding of what Christian faith is with an essentialised understanding of what Muslim tradition, Jewish practice, Hindu belief etc. is.  In doing so, all of these traditions are divorced from the individuals who see themselves as adherents, practitioners, devotees etc. – even the description of what people do and are in these different contexts is problematic!

If we think about the term ‘faith’ we can point to similar problems: for example, what does faith mean for a Christian, and what does it mean for a Jew?  Firstly there is again the problem of essentialisation – ask one Christian or one Jew about their understanding, and their Christian or Jewish neighbour may well offer quite a different one.  But even if we could put this aside (and I don’t think we really can), we might say that a Christian would point to the centrality of salvific belief through the death and resurrection of Jesus for her ‘faith’, whilst a Jew would point to the centrality of grateful obedience and freedom in God’s law for his ‘faith’.  In other words, we are comparing almost entirely different understandings of belief and practice – whilst pretending that all these things can be described equally as ‘faith’ (or indeed, religion).

We can see these problems even on the WIHW website, which has the byline ‘Love of God & Love of the Neighbour, or Love of the Good & Love of the Neighbour’.  An ‘or’ clause is certainly one way of attempting to cover all bases: it is, after all, something of a cliché to ask who the ‘God’ is that a Buddhist might be directing their attention to (a Buddhist from Britain, India, Tibet…? again, essentialisation), but whether ‘the Good’ is an appropriate alternative universal truth comparable to any given individual’s understanding of God, has to be open to question.  The sentiment behind the creation of ‘Harmony Beads’ for use in prayer by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Catholics is another example of such muddled thinking.

So if neither faith nor religion can serve as useful comparative or relational concepts, it is perhaps intellectually more honest and practically more fruitful to abandon the pretence of ‘interfaith’ dialogue in favour of simple ‘interhuman’ dialogue.  It is, after all, in relationships that we discover ourselves and one another, rather than in monolithic ideological constructs founded on varying precepts.  If our theologies, principles, religious laws or injunctions hinder or prevent such relationships, then that is surely what we should be seeking to address and change.  After all, if dialogue between individuals can be centred around a demanding common task such as the creation of just economic systems and sustainable ecological environments, the overcoming of patriarchy or liberation from oppressive political regimes (the list could go on!), then these human connections will also lead to improved understanding of what moves and motivates engagement by each individual, whether they describe this as faith, religion, belief, practice, ritual… and that will be a more meaningful encounter than any World Interfaith Harmony Week can possibly lead to.

Praying For Japan

21 Monday Mar 2011

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This blog posting was written by Kat Neumann, who is writing her PhD under Andrew Hass and Alison Jasper.

After the catastrophic events in Japan, the language of secular politics and news reports on the economic and political impact on food supplies, the stock market, rising flight fares and evacuation of Western nationals, tactically evade the humanitarian horror scenarios, which meanwhile haunt our imagination, and touch base with our own privatised existences. The traditional response, in a Christian context, is the appeal to prayer. And yet, our modern minds have little if anything to go by when “prayer” is invoked – an emotional safety-blanket for some, a futile appeal to God, whom we fail to recognise in the continuous flow of “bad news” that reach us from Japan and elsewhere, for others. A clearer conception of what is meant by Christian prayer is needed if we, who may still hold to some form of Christian faith, are to find in it an adequate, that is, a sensible yet sensitive response to the situation.

The German theologian Dorothee Sölle (1929-2003), who until recently did not receive much critical attention from the academy, has been popularly known in Germany for her political activism, her engagement with the German peace movement throughout the Cold War, and her poetry. What fascinates me about this writer is the way that she engages religious sources – both the biblical text and the Christian tradition – to render her political context meaningful to personal faith without abandoning rational thought or analytical discourse, yet supplementing it with a poetic vision that reconfigures the divine after the “death of God”. What this means is, that there is no place for romantic notions of God as one who directs the world and is ultimately responsible for the workings-out of history (relieving the political subject of lasting ethical obligations, tying these to the temporality of sin). On the premise that with the Holocaust there can be no God that intervenes and directs each individual fate according to a divine, predetermined plan, Christianity is called again to uncover what the metaphor of “God” as the signifier of the Unnameable One means in the concrete reality of this world. This forces Sölle to consider prayer for this world and in this world as a means, not to gain magical favours from a metaphysical otherworld, but for enabling divine revelation in the concrete realities by which we are confronted.

Sölle, within the climate of the Arms Race and the bloc building between East and West, can serve as a model for genuine prayer today, particularly in light of the potential nuclear disaster we are witnessing in the aftermath to the Tsunami that hit Japan. Sölle structured prayer meetings concerning political events and social problems along a threefold organisation: information, meditation and collective action. “Deprivatised prayer” (Sölle, 1971) was not to be public vanity as one exposes oneself as a believer to the world, but the conscious articulation of one’s faith in relation to the world and a preparation for realising an alternative vision by concrete (political) action. Rather than denominational boundaries or institutional dogmas, this process would rehearse and reveal mutual concerns that would mobilize people into recognizing their role and potentials for changing the status quo. This aim for prayer, the self-articulation and engagement with the world that recognises the believer’s own, “private” spiritual need (for salvation in whatever shape or form to be envisioned) as bound up with the “fate” of the world, places faith firmly in the public sphere, and is the first step in manifesting compassion.

What the press describes in the ordeal of the so-called “Fukushima 50” is the human responsiveness to catastrophe. In the concrete threat of nuclear melt-down and high levels of radiation, the presence of the “Fukushima 50”, as a human symbol of self-sacrifice, draws attention to a concrete formulation of compassion, borne out of the urgency of the situation: ‘in the words of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan, “retreat is unthinkable.”’ (March 18th). It is an intercession, a bid for time for those who these workers are seeking to protect and keep alive. Their struggle to contain the direct consequences of the damages caused by the earthquake and subsequent flood is paradigmatic of “deprivatised prayer”. Their work is public protest against suffering nuclear holocaust.

The “Fukushima 50” have offered the world their petition – extending the time and space to reach out to the world. They remind us that we are not only responsible, to ourselves, and to those who come after us, but that we owe it to those that have gone before us, too, to join in their prayer. Terrifying as the ever-unfolding reports of the disaster from Japan appear, they cannot be overlooked. How then do we relate, how do we respond to the suffering these workers bring to focus? A prayer set in context of Japan published on the website of the World Council of Churches reads as follows:

Lord Jesus,
the storm is life and life is the storm
and there is no escaping it;
but what matters is that you are in the storm with us,
a beacon and a presence that is sure. Amen

What this prayer articulates is not only the inevitability of being faced with difficulties and dangers, but the assertion that “what matters” is assured solidarity. If we want to be able to turn the prayer of petition of the “Fukushima 50” into a prayer of thanksgiving, we need to substantiate our presence with these workers, with Japan. Only when we use the time that they have given to us to respond – in practical terms – to the suffering we all need to recognise, can we validate their sacrifice and call ourselves responsible. Sin is social denial of the suffering of the afflicted. Prayer is transformative contextualisation.

On Theory and Practice in Religious Studies

14 Monday Mar 2011

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This is the first time I have ever ‘blogged’. In fact the latter word was so new to my PC that I had to add it to the dictionary in the software. In the course of the past two decade I have, however, both made field notes and kept a personal journal as I moved between two very different academic contexts and I draw upon these resources in the following observations.

As Professor of Divinity in Scotland’s most ancient university with its longstanding traditions of scholarly activity and golf (a searching pastime and form of outdoor freemasonry), I was participant observer in what was until fairly recently an exclusively male lineage saturated with explicit patriarchy. I then moved from a university that is about to celebrate the six hundredth anniversary of its foundation in 1411-12 to a Chair in Religious Studies at my alma mater, a wet and windswept concrete and brick sixties campus university in the northwest of England, a locale that in part inspired Malcolm Bradbury’s notorious novel, The History Man. It has to be said that the extraordinarily different genii loci of both contexts were very much alive, although the now omnipresent dead hand of bureaucratising British managerialism is successfully killing off and marginalising nearly all individuality as diamonds are relentlessly transmuted into glass.

When I survey a lifetime and a career spent shifting back and forth between ‘Religious Studies’ and ‘Theology’, I find much of the ideological polarisation erected between these ways of doing things less than helpful. This is above all the case in an era of ever-growing and multi-dimensional global crisis in which the identity-intensifying phenomena traditionally represented by the problematic Western category of ‘religion’ play an important, yet extremely ambiguous role.

Whilst I had the privilege of swinging between these seemingly antithetical academic contexts, for me the pendulum came to rest in a decade of subsistence on the periphery of academia as I explored the interface between burgeoning psychotherapies ranging from the banal repetitiveness of Rogerian counselling to the sudden and unexpected transpersonal insights of psychodrama – and the marketplace of once alternative (but now increasingly main-line) spiritualities. This borderland runs through contexts that extend from (e.g.) the milieu of casual power-clothing in organisational shamanism and transformational rituals in top-flight schools of management and leadership studies courses to primal screaming, firewalking, rebirthing, and running sky- and ash-clad over the sand dunes at initiatory men’s gatherings. Experienced in this way no-one could accuse Religious Studies of being boring.

At the same time as going on this journey I began, as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross puts it in her landmark book, On Death and Dying, the process of ‘learning from the dying’ through a series of workshops led by an Irish seabhéan Phyllida Anam-Aire (‘soul-mother’) who had trained with Kübler-Ross herself. This fieldwork confronted me with dimensions of human pain precipitated for the most part by childhood sexual abuse and rape of participants in relation to which it seemed to me well nigh impossible to maintain the epoche, the bracketing out of the researcher’s subjectivity. My entire self-understanding was called into question and my personal and intellectual identity had to expand and own realities largely new to me, that is if I were to be both true to myself and to the manifest needs of others.

As it happens, what began as participant observation turned out to be an essential preparation for supporting, caring for, nursing and the eventual ‘home death’ of Audrey, my wife and life-partner for over forty years. The decade of my immersion was for my wife a time of acute illness and then terminal cancer and this distressing reality caused me draw upon what I was learning in fieldwork. Here one re-learned that bodies are indeed all too real and intrinsic, and that they should not be regarded as merely empty signifiers upon which to project metaphors and meaning. Bodies are, of course, both; as touch replaces words body speaks silently in love to body in mutual surrender before the final relinquishment of the physical relationship in decathexis.

Much of the fieldwork I engaged in demanded degrees of confidentiality that has made publication extremely problematic. Nonetheless, any idea that I might, along with the radical secularisers within Religious Studies and the sociology of religion, regard what I experienced and then deployed as the trivial spiritual residue of a fading human pathology is both implausible and unacceptable.

The problem remains: how can one responsibly represent human experience as this is characterised by ritualisation and altered states of consciousness and as they manifest themselves today in late modernity through complex processes of differentiation, migration and surrogacy within a theoretical framework that needs to extend from the level of globalisation down through human communities to the individual, afflicted human body? How can we clarify this matrix in order, as I would hope, not merely to explain and facilitate comprehension, but also to make intelligently accessible ways of doing things that are as ancient and, I believe, as important to humankind as the making of music?

Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth

21 Monday Feb 2011

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One classic collection of essays by anthropologists on the definition of religion which was required reading in the course at King’s College, London on anthropology of religion was Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (1966) edited by E. M. Banton. Though this is now an old book it contains interesting and influential essays by Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Melford Spiro and others which are still frequently referred to, especially the one by Geertz. However their overall effect has been, I would argue, to reinscribe and validate ‘religion’ into the general academic discourse on which they have had considerable influence. While raising and discussing many of the problems of applying a Europhone category in the context of radically different languages and cultures, these essays did not interrogate the ideological power dynamics behind the discourse itself. The category ‘religion’ and its demarcation from the social or secular was not systematically questioned; only the best way to define religion for research purposes.

For example, Geertz famously defined religion as “[1] a system of symbols which acts to [2] establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations…by [3] formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and [4] clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that [5] the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”. But this definition arguably straddles all dominant ideologies, and does not tell us how a religious ideology differs from a non-religious one. Nor does it sufficiently draw attention to the power of dominant institutions (such as preaching, courts, persuasive theories by educated elites, advertising or the media) to protect these symbols, and to promote the sense of their inescapable reality. A powerful analogy may be from feminist analysis of the way dominant gender categories become transformed into inescapable facts of biological nature, disguising the power relations inherent in the representations. The assumption that there is some essential distinction between religious and non-religious domains – which is still today a globalizing discourse – is an ideological construct which takes on an appearance of naturalness and inevitability.

Spiro’s definition was a sophisticated reworking, in the context of his own interesting ethnography of Burmese Buddhism, of E. B. Tylor’s definition as belief in gods or superhuman agents. However, one of the problems with a definition in terms of gods or the supernatural or the superhuman is that these terms themselves are difficult to translate into many non-European languages. Even within European Christendom the meaning of God has been policed and contested by powerful theological agencies, and it is not at all clear that the Trinitarian God of the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis is equivalent to what Calvin understood by God. The stretch may be even further to the conceptions of Unitarianism or Deism. Muslim theologians who believe in Allah have held that the Christian Trinitarian God is itself a form of idolatry.

What anthropologists and others now sometimes refer to as ‘gods’ has been used historically by Christians in the sense of false idols, pagan heresies, demons and devil worship. These theological misrepresentations of other people’s concepts do not engender confidence in their use as neutral descriptive and analytical concepts. This point is strengthened by the fact that, even today, some evangelical missionaries still hold these beliefs and still use this kind of language. For example, a Protestant mission in Mexico was motivated by the desire to save people from their pagan village economies and “raise the rate of return on conversions”.

To take just two examples of non-European languages, Sanskrit and Japanese: it is problematic to claim that gods provides a neutral translation for Indian categories such as Brahman, deva, devata or Bodhisattva; or into Japanese categories such as  kami, hotoke, or bosatsu. It is equally problematic to attribute belief in the ‘supernatural’ and its supposed distinction from the ‘natural’ to non-European languages and cultures around the world. Some writers have substituted the term ‘superhuman’ as a way to resolve this problem of the ‘supernatural’ while retaining the term ‘religion’ as a distinct form of life. But if the term superhuman has any advantages, it tends to erode a distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ domains. In some Indian conceptions there is no ultimate distinction between the human and the superhuman, as the practice of kissing the feet of enlightened gurus and powerful politicians suggests. Many sadhus are believed to be ‘living gods’ in the sense that they have become one with the divine reality which permeates what we illusorily experience as a mundane world. This is not a pedantic distinction; the veneration given to a sadhu or a living bodhisattva is part of a total system of representations that defines the identity of billions of people.

It is astonishing that experts in International Relations believe they can classify these complex ideologies without any real knowledge in simplistic English categories and then advocate foreign policy decisions on their basis. In Japan the Emperor was ikigami (usually but perhaps misleadingly translated as ‘living god’) at a time when the Meiji Constitution of 1889 constituted State Shinto as the Japanese equivalent of the secular State. In 1946 the US Occupation forces rewrote the Constitution which declared that State Shinto cannot legally exist and that shinto is really a religion and should be classified as such; and that the Emperor is no longer Ikigami but something more like a British Constitutional Monarch. Here it is clear that power decides what gets classified as a religious belief and what gets classified as a secular one.

Extract from T. Fitzgerald, Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth, (Continuum Press, 2011 forthcoming, hardback, paperback).