Critical religion and the religion-secular binary: a response to Richard Roberts

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

Tags

'the new rulers of the world', capitalism, Critical Religion, economic theory, managerialism, pseudo-religions, religion-secular binary, Richard H. Roberts, ritual, socialism

(Note that this posting refers directly to this blog entry by Richard H. Roberts, itself in part a response to an earlier posting of mine.)

Thanks to Richard for his thoughts on my work. The problem begins with his title, ‘Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?’ This implies that one might find no value in any of that vast range of moral communities and their practices and that are typically classified by Euro-Americans as ‘religious’. This is a basic misunderstanding. My argument is that classifying such communities, and their practices and values, as ‘religious’ has the effect of marginalizing them from the mainstream of public debates on justice and the proper ends of the good life. Such classification has the effect of clothing secular reason with the misleading aura of neutral objectivity, as the central, fundamental and inescapable order of things, and disguising the metaphysical commitments and ideological value-judgments which underpin secular institutions.

This part of the argument does not come directly from Marx, because Marx’s vast and complex work contains ambiguities about both ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ science or politics. One aspect of Marx which I reject, but which was emphasized by Lenin in the foundation of the Soviet socialist State, was its phoney scientistic claims to objective knowledge of the laws of history and socialist economic theory. In 1905 Lenin clearly expressed a secular scientific standpoint as the basis of Revolution, and in the process reproduced a similar dichotomy between religion and secularity as that produced earlier in the 19^th century by the tradition of liberal economics. A.N.C. Waterman (2008) holds that Richard Whately, in his inaugural lecture of 1831 as Drummond Professor of Economics, was the first to claim that economics is a secular science essentially different from ‘religion’. Waterman’s purpose in his historical argument is to show how the basic presumptions of liberal economic theory derived quite directly from debates in moral theology since the late 17^th century. (However, I don’t assume that Waterman would necessarily wish to draw the same conclusions as Robert Nelson in his book Economics as Religion (2001), which also explores such issues).

I suggest that both socialist and liberal capitalist economics have been different stages in, and different forms of, the same processes which transformed the meaning of Religion from Christian truth to one of a large range of dubious practices that should be tolerated but marginalized. In both cases we find the mystification of secular reason and ‘progress’, and the reduction of alternative moral discourses which might challenge both state socialism and liberal (or neo-liberal) capitalism.

This positivistic tradition of interpreting Marx needs to be put next to other possible readings of Marx. One is the critical tradition of Marxism (on which I know that Richard is well-informed) which sees all knowledge as having an ideological component and function in the legitimation of a hegemonic worldview. My contribution to this important insight, pursued by Gramsci and also the Frankfurt school among others, is that the religion-secular binary is a foundational part of the naturalization of both ‘scientific’ socialism and ‘scientific’ capitalism.

Another, less critical position which I do not share is reflected in the habit of Richard’s mentor Ninian Smart and other writers to describe Marxism as a pseudo-religion or quasi-religion. By arguing that Marxism is a pseudo-religion, the assumption is introduced that it is not a ‘real’ religion. But what is a real religion?

My own argument is that, rather than searching for, or assuming the existence of, real religions as against pseudo-religions, we need to look at how the term religion has been used historically. What I believe to be the case is that, in English language at least (and I doubt if the case is much different in German, Dutch, or French) for several centuries since the Reformation the term ‘religion’ was used typically to refer to Christian truth, mainly Protestant truth, and that this dominant discourse on religion encompassed government and every other institution. In that context, ‘secular’ also had a profoundly different meaning from the one given to it much later by 19^th century writers such as Whately (1831) or Charles Holyoake (1851), or, in the early 20^th century by Lenin.

In the older paradigm of the meaning of religion as Christian truth, ‘pseudo-religions’ were the equivalent of paganisms, irrational substitutes for real religion (Protestantism). When writers like Samuel Purchas in the early 17^th century wrote about the religions of the world, my claim is that this was an ironic or parodic use of the term, even though such parodic observations on the foolish practices of heathens did represent a stage in the later, long-term development of the so-called scientific study of ‘religions’. Thus, while an important scholar like Max Muller was claiming that religions can be studied scientifically, he was simultaneously subscribing to the view that only Protestant Christianity was a fully fledged religion, and that Hindu practices were degenerate and irrational. This deeply ideological use of the term has passed into the foundations of religious studies.

Given these ideological uses of such a contested term, it seems difficult to understand how ‘religion’ could ever appear to be a neutral category useful for objective and empathetic knowledge. On the contrary, I hold that this duality in the historical deployment of religion, which is still powerfully evident, both elides its contentious value judgments and at the same time inscribes the conceits of the secular as the unavoidable ground of rational judgment.

In this context Richard’s title ‘Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?’ seems unclear in its meaning. It partly depends on what Richard intends to mean by religion. Is he referring to the Catholic Mass? Or the Prince-Pope Pontifex Maximus? Or the ‘religious orders’ as distinct from the secular priesthood? Or the practice of Communion by English male elites in Parliament well into the 19^th century? Or the anointing of the Sovereign head of the Commonwealth, up to and including Queen Elizabeth II in 1953? Does it refer to Christian truth as distinct from Pagan superstitions, as contemporary evangelical missionaries have it? Does it refer to those practices and communities deemed in one powerfully-disseminated contemporary discourse as dangerous, irrational and with a special propensity to terrorism? Or does it refer indifferently to that vast range of practices, from witchcraft to Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika to the rituals of untouchability to ‘shamanism’, all of which are regularly classified as ‘religion’? Or does it refer to the worship of Mozart and devotion to the art of Opera? Why not classify Opera, football, or faith in ‘human progress’ as religious?

But it also depends on what readers mean by ‘religion’. Even if Richard is himself clear about what he intends to mean, there are multiple possible readings which can be taken away by other readers. We have little control over our own intended meanings once they are in the public arena. This is not to mention the problems of translation into non-European languages. One way or another, to suggest that something good or bad can be said for ‘religion’ misses the point about what is being argued.

Richard cites the late anthropologist Roy Rappaport that ritual is the basic social act. But this does not help us distinguish between a religious ritual and a nonreligious, secular one. If ritual is basic, then I would suggest it undercuts the religion-secular binary which can be seen as a historically modern, ideological imposition. I would hazard to say that the idea of a religious ritual – as distinct, for example, from Henry VIII’s discourse on ‘politick rites’- is itself a modern invention.

Furthermore, if I go by Richard’s admittedly and inescapably brief representation of Rappaport’s work, I would ask if ‘ritual’ is being used to refer to a sui generis kind of practice, essentially different from a large range of others, such as training, holding meetings, decision-making processes, editing footnotes and bibliographies, holding elections, participating in conferences, fighting wars, ballroom dancing, or news-reading? Where does ritual end and purely instrumental action begin (if there is such a thing)?

I regret Richard’s resort to the claim that questioning ‘religion’ could lead to the closure of departments and the loss of jobs. One of the things I most respect about Richard – in addition to his outstanding scholarly work – is the way he has stood up for the democratization of the work-place against the arbitrary and dogmatic authoritarianism of the managerial class, at some cost to his own career. But the managerial class are empowered by the capitalist state, and by the mystification of markets and capital. Is he now saying that academics such as myself should cut and trim their own modest search for truth about the human condition to the templates of the HRM? This itself seems to me to be a capitulation to the regnant ideology of managerialism which he suggests I am indulging. On the contrary, my project questions the way ‘religion’ acts as a discursive cover for the presumed superior rationality of the value of self-maximizing Individuals, and of secular markets and their devoted managers. We have more chance of focusing our intellectual critique and generating a democratic debate about the purpose of universities, and the critical values which they arguably ought to embody (or could embody), by fearlessly questioning the way ‘knowledge’ is constructed. I am rather surprised that Richard doesn’t find this line of thought congenial to his own original research into shamanistic practices.

For me, in my own life, the practice of meditation is fundamental. It has much to do with truth (if I can use that word without sounding pretentious) and is often deconstructive of ‘knowledge’, or puts knowledge in a less exalted and more tentative place. Meditation (for me, at least) undercuts its typical modern ideological classification as a ‘religious’ practice as distinct from a ‘secular’ one. Nor do I have any interest in describing it as ‘scientific’, for that would merely play to the same ideological binary. By classifying such a practice as ‘religious’, its epistemological and ontological implications get de-centred and quarantined, leaving the myths of secular reason and markets unchallenged. If I claim it to be ‘scientific’, then I am still in the contentious market-place of nomenclature that depends on the same stultifying binary discourse.

The widespread practice of classifying communities as ‘religious’ ensures that they will not be taken seriously by the people John Pilger describes as ‘the new rulers of the world’. If the representations of the many diverse communities around the world are to be heard, I think we should desist from committing this act of ‘epistemic violence’ – to adopt an expression from the British Sikh scholar Arvind-Pal Mandair (2010).

Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?

11 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by Richard H. Roberts in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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agency, capitalism, Critical Religion, deconstruction, democratic intellect, George Elder Davie, human condition, ideology, nihilism, postcolonial, religion, riots, ritual, shaman-ritual complex, theology, Timothy Fitzgerald

As readers of the Critical Religion blog may be aware, my trenchant colleague Tim Fitzgerald has once more launched a missile against the category of ‘religion’ in his recent posting (30 May 2011) as the word reappeared in what he regards as the wholly illusory notion of ‘the global resurgence of religion’ advanced by Scott M. Thomas in 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).

Tim Fitzgerald has written a series of major books in which he has with unsparing consistency sought to deconstruct the ‘religion and secular politics binary’. Fitzgerald’s, The Ideology of Religious Studies (OUP 2000), his magisterial historical study Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A critical history of religion and related categories (OUP 2007) and the forthcoming Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth all bear rich witness to this ongoing preoccupation. In the opening pages of Civility and Barbarity Fitzgerald expatiates at length upon the awesome potency of Arturo di Modica’s bovine masterpiece, the Bull of Wall Street, the very embodiment of the power of capitalism. In a paean of admiration reminiscent of Marx’s hymnic response to the capacity of capitalist (and bourgeois) modernity to melt all that is solid, Fitzgerald writes:

For this Leviathan is no sacred cow dwelling in the pastures of agricultural hierarchies. Looked at from the back view, you can see he has bronze balls the size of mystic gongs, and you wouldn’t want to be tossed, mauled or trampled in this arena. The Beast of Capital can normally be placated through the performance of the appropriate ritual proprieties, but he will fork you on his horns if you waver in your faith (p. x)

Indeed, this reader envisages Fitzgerald as a slaughterman repeatedly striving to confront the bull, avoid its horns, plant his bolt gun on the brow of the beast, pull the trigger and fell it for good.

There are, however, problems associated with this kind of approach to ‘critical religion’ and the oppositional reification, even fetishisation of the mythopoeic and alienative capacity of capitalism. These problems do not, for me, stem from any inadequacies in Fitzgerald’s erudite analysis, that is once a reader has accepted all the basic postulates of his standpoint. As it happens, although I share with my colleague a belief in the validity and importance of aspects of Marx’s mythologised account of capitalism as ‘the jealous god’ as it is expounded in the posthumously published Grundrisse and elsewhere in the Marxian oeuvre, I do not agree with other aspects of his analysis and the lines of argument associated with, for example, leading contributors to the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, notably the prolific writer Russell McCutcheon.

I believe that the difficulty resides in a confusion between ‘religion’ understood as a ‘category’ on the one hand and the study of the religion as a ‘field’. In principle, I remain critically loyal to the updating and renewal of the approach to the study of religion pioneered by my own esteemed first teacher, the late Ninian Smart, who had a free hand at Lancaster to develop as an interdisciplinary cluster of insights within an area of human experience and concern. This was an approach inspired by such figures as Edmund Husserl, Gerhardus Van Der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade, which was shared and then developed by, for example, Edward Conze, Michael Pye, and now Gavin Flood of Oxford. Within what the French sociologist of religion, Danièle Hervieu-Leger, has called ‘le champ religieux’, there is space for many interdisciplinary coalitions to emerge that may then harness the appropriate theories and methods with which to access and represent the multifarious contexts in which the phenomena of human needs for community, transition and transformation occur.

Given Fitzgerald’s ongoing critique and deconstruction of categories what are we to do – and to think – if we find ourselves compelled to engage in ritual or other spiritual practices? This is, of course, on the assumption that such an aspirant practitioner might detect some vestige of human benefit in what we are not allowed to call in the most general terms in Anglo-American and European societies ‘religion’. In the interests of purging and purification where may those who like the customers exploited in Carrette and King’s ‘spiritual marketplace’ and the victims exploited in Heelas and Woodhead’s ‘spiritual revolution’ now turn?

The situation as it emerges in Fitzgerald’s critique may well remind us of that described in the early writings of Friedrich Engels, who observed that the weavers of Wuppertal ‘who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness’ and presented the memorable image of the blacksmith, ‘on his right side the Bible, on his left ‑ very often at any rate ‑ a bottle of Schnapps’ captivated by the revivalist preacher Pastor Jürgens who entrances the congregation so that ‘first the young girls weep, then the old women join in with a heart‑rending soprano and the cacophony is completed by the wailing of the enfeebled drunken pietists’.

In short, we are right back with ‘religion’ as the opiate that numbs the pain of existence and deludes the mind with structures of false consciousness and ideology.

Whilst the category of ‘religion’ may indeed be construed as a merely modern category conjoined with emergent liberalism that may then be inappropriately projected onto societies and cultures of a perpetually estranged ‘other’, we should not fall victim once more to the contemporary analogue of the fallacies of a displaced version of the German Ideology, through which we dismiss the state and liberalism as simply the illusory and oppressive constructs of the dominant class, and seek their destruction in the secular eschatological hope of some kind of benevolent political Aufhebung.

As scholars in the field of religious studies (and I do not exclude from this the critically reflexive study of the discourses of traditions under the rubric of ‘theology’) we need both to interrogate and to investigate with empathic understanding that dimension of human life that originates in prehistoric antiquity, informs the lives of countless millions of human beings, and now manifests itself in an array of displaced and surrogate forms in the contemporary world. The world is in desperate crisis and in equally urgent need of beneficent shared symbolic universals. Religious and spiritual practices can serve as a benign source of such universals along with an array of other sources energised by what I refer to as the shamano-ritual complex.

Ironically enough, the quest for the extirpation of the category of ‘religion’ through its analytical deconstruction runs the acute risk of going way beyond critique into unmitigated destruction. Such an academic mission can further the current tendency to close down the Humanities in British higher education. The deconstruction of a category is therefore in imminent danger of becoming the destruction of a field. Such an attitude brings comfort to those in higher education deploying the techniques of human resources management who can now simply step back and watch scholars declare themselves devoid of viable categories and thus render their quiet elimination all the easier.

This situation enables the real enemies of what the Scottish historian George Elder Davie has called the ‘democratic intellect’ characteristic of the Scottish university tradition to conquer by default. The foes of an informed democracy will scarcely have to lift a finger if scholars in Religious Studies (and the Humanities at large) declare themselves and their colleagues to be relying upon nothing but figments of the class interest of the Western bourgeois imagination and the interstitial traces of a vanquished primitivism.

The events of the past week in England show that fundamental issues pertaining to the legitimation of government, social justice, and societal stability need to be addressed, or the anomie now evident in riots on the streets may engulf us all. In my view, scholars in Religious Studies should not simply remain the reluctant but paid tools of an industrialised system of defective socialisation that initiates students into informed passivity, but the source of a truly critical discourse that broadens the imagination and enhances personal agency.

Musicology and philosophy, religion and political science – the issue of interdisciplinarity

15 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, Edward Said, higher education, humanities, interdisciplinarity, liberal education, music, musicology, religion, secular, university

I have for some time been reflecting on why it is that so few ‘secular’ scholars engage meaningfully with ‘religion’, or to put it another way: why is it that so many of us as religion scholars depend upon and practice disciplinary heterogeneity, whereas many of the scholars we use do not appear to engage substantially with what we write. My thinking on this has been further prompted by reading a blog entry by J.P.E. Harper-Scott, Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He recently wrote about a conference he attended for musicologists and philosophers. The frustration evident in his posting is clear: the musicologists at his conference engaged actively with a variety of philosophers, but from his perspective at least, few if any of the philosophers engaged seriously with musicologists that he regarded as central to his work.

He outlines his main point as follows:

The musicologists at the conference are interested in philosophy. They read major figures such as Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and so on, and they read the secondary literature too… at least enough to gain perspective on the principal debates… In the main, however, philosophers who are interested in music… do not read musicology. If they did, then their frequently catastrophic failures of definition and unwillingness to engage with – or even conceive of – political, economic, cultural, and historical context for the music, composers (where there are any), performers, listeners, and critics who jointly make up the world we call ‘music’ would show up to them as glaringly as an elementary error in a syllogism. The short form: there will never be meaningful exchange between philosophy and musicology while philosophers fail to read anything as obvious as the major writings of Richard Taruskin.

That I can do no more than acknowledge knowing Taruskin is a musicologist limits any further comment I might make on Harper-Scott’s argument about musicologists and philosophers. However, as I asked in a comment on his blog, why is it that some disciplines seem to be more interdisciplinary than others? After all, the experience he describes is far from unique. I want to develop my relatively unformed comment a little in this blog posting.

Many of us working in the field of ‘religion’ depend upon a variety of other disciplines – such as political science, philosophy, history, linguistics, phenomenology and more – to help us understand the phenomena we are dealing with. Consequently, numerous scholars who are not directly involved in ‘religion’ as a discipline inform the work that I (and many other colleagues) pursue. For example, in a relatively short essay soon to appear in what promises to be a useful collection on Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (eds. Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Karina Hestad Skeie), I refer to the following scholars (in order of appearance): Gen Doy, Simon Gikandi, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, Benedict Anderson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Casey, Jeremy Black, Hélène Gill, Victor Turner, Homi Bhabha, Karina Hestad Skeie, Pierre Bourdieu, Christine Lindner, Andrew Ross, Susan Thorne, David Richards, Lester Irwin Vogel, Bill Marshall, Robert Young, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. This list reveals a fairly clear ideological bias, but it also suggests a wide range of disciplines that I draw on for my paper – and in this regard I see myself as a typical religion scholar: most of the interesting ‘religion’ work I read uses these scholars and many more.

However, few of the scholars I mentioned not explicitly working in the field of religion (such as Skeie, Lindner, Ross, Thorne, Vogel) appear to engage very much with religion scholars of any hue, even if we think of ‘religion’ in extremely broad terms. Why is it that so few ‘secular’ scholars fail to engage meaningfully with ‘religion’? For example, Said’s dismissal of missionaries in Orientalism has been commented on adversely by many – though that has not stopped scholars using his work creatively (one might think directly of work such as Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East).

However we understand ‘religion’, whether as a category or as a field of study – and there are issues here that go to the core of what we think the discipline of ‘religion’ is about – Harper-Scott, in his response to my comment, identifies the problem in ontic/ontological terms. I can see a validity to this understanding, though I would express it slightly differently and perhaps point to the idea of ‘professionalism’, as Said called it in his 1993 Reith Lectures (Representations of the Intellectual, New York: Vintage, 1994: 73-4; rather wonderfully, the BBC have made it possible to listen to his lectures online).

Said argues that amongst other things, professionalism induces specialisation. One very clear way in which this manifests itself in the contemporary context is in governmental assessment exercises. In the UK, for example, academics are required to write several pieces of work that can be entered into the RAE, or REF, or whatever the government’s lackeys of the day decide to call the arbitrary quantification of academic ‘output’ – even the word induces nausea – as if writing an article is being equated with factory production. These ‘outputs’ are assessed by other academics in ‘the same field’, the idea being that political scientists are best placed to peer review and assess the work of other political scientists, religion scholars can best do the same for their colleagues, and so on. Of course, there is an inherent logic here, but one of the problems with this approach is that it fosters increased specialisation, and in turn, Said argues, this leads to shutting out other disciplines; from the perspective of a literary scholar:

Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies. To be a specialist in literature too often means shutting out history or music, or politics. (p77)

The production of ‘impersonal theories or methodologies’ fits the stereotype of the academic in the wider public, but this is core of the problem. What happens to the disciplines that have been shut out? Simplistically put, they often tend to shut out other disciplines too, the consequence being atomisation – whilst this makes control by university administrators and management much easier, it tends to deaden wide-ranging intellectual and public engagement. And it is precisely engagement – in the academy and the wider world – that Said argues for. Not as a ‘professional’ he points out, but as an amateur, engaging in ‘an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization'(p82); this sounds remarkably similar to Harper-Scott’s description of musicologists’ approach to philosophy. Said is not suggesting that this is easy, far from it! His Humanism and Democratic Criticism (esp. ch. 5) discusses further some of the immense difficulties involved (and he is not the only one to deal with these issues, as, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus demonstrates).

However, the obvious difficulties involved do not obviate the necessity of such engagement. Of course, if it is impossible to see how one’s academic life might relate to the wider world, it will be difficult to see how it could relate to other academics, and how other academics could relate to it. What connects the list of scholars noted above in relation to my essay is their general willingness to engage across and beyond the boundaries of ‘their’ discipline, whether this be politics, economics, or history etc., however hard it may be. Indeed, it is probably appropriate to argue that some of the most stimulating scholars are those who explicitly engage with other disciplines and the wider world. The apparent failure, often, to engage with religion is therefore all the more puzzling.

There is, of course, a difference in the way musicologists and religion scholars have dealt with some of the issues raised by postmodern thinkers: I think it is probably impossible for most musicologists to deny the existence of ‘music’ and the attendant emotional and physical engagement that the practice of music, however defined, can offer. Engagement, as Said calls it, has multiple levels; with some scholars essentially denying the existence of religion as a phenomenon enabling emotional and psychological engagement and seeing it only as a category of study, it is perhaps understandable that scholars from other disciplines might see what we think of as important as actually being irrelevant.

I suspect this is perhaps part of the issue for many who see themselves outwith the discipline of religion: a lack of personal engagement with religion – however defined – means they regard themselves as ‘secular’ without ever really thinking about what that term means (in other words, they ‘don’t believe in god’ and therefore they must be ‘secular’). In this kind of thinking, ‘secular’ is the mainstream and ‘religion’ is seen as an optional but largely irrelevant add-on. From such a starting point there is no reason to think an understanding of religion might have a substantial bearing on political science, history, economics etc. Perhaps this stems from a mistaken understanding that there is ‘a universal definition of religion’ that can be compartmentalised away, failing to recognise historical contingencies and discursive constructions arising from and impacting upon politics, history, economics and so on (as Talal Asad would perhaps argue). That precise problematic is, of course, one of the key issues that the Critical Religion Research Group is seeking to address in its programmes, and my colleagues and I seek to explore different aspects of this in our various blog postings. As the summer is upon us and we look back at nearly six months of postings on a variety of topics, it is to be hoped that a helpful contribution to the furtherance of interdisciplinarity and understanding of the place of ‘the study of religion’ has been made.

‘The study of religion’ (as it is often called) is ‘an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary mode of engagement: incorporating many disciplines, but also going beyond the limits of any one discipline’ (as we say here). Reflecting on what it is we are thinking about when we think about ‘religion’ helps us cross disciplinary boundaries and engage with wider questions, and can, in fact, only happen by doing so. Perhaps the philosophers at Harper-Scott’s conference left with a greater awareness of the importance of engaging with musicologists’ work; similarly we hope that ‘non-religion’ scholars will find what we do stimulates further engagement with some of the questions we are dealing with. Conversing with other religion scholars is good – conversing with people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds is even better!

(I would like to gratefully acknowledge comments from Richard Roberts on an early draft of this posting, though he is not, of course, to blame for any inconsistencies etc. in my text.)

The Problem of Evil: Adolf Eichmann and Levi Bellfield

07 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by Bashir S. in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 2 Comments

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Critical Religion, dead/death, emotion, evil, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Levi Bellfield, Shoah/Holocaust

The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, first coined the expression ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963). She was sent to Jerusalem in 1961 by The New Yorker to cover the trial of the former Nazi, Adolf Eichmann for his role in the practical planning and management of the ‘final solution’. She concluded that Eichmann was no kind of grand, operatic or blood-spattered axe-fiend with bloodshot eyes. He had undertaken this work because he was ambitious, hard-working and essentially small-minded. When she called him ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’ it was this – in some ways, innocuous – lack of imagination she was thinking about. The problem was, of course, that in the circumstances in which he found himself, his inability to distance himself from his role, to engage with any sense of what we might call a conscience or perhaps even a consciousness of himself, proved lethal for millions.

In our reactions to Eichmann, there is always some fear that we might also be capable of doing what he has done; of being responsible for so much death and destruction or of having to bear that abysmal shame. Arendt noted how hard it was for those involved in Eichmann’s trial: ‘it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that [he] was a monster’. Much time and effort was spent trying to prove that he had actually killed someone himself. But Eichmann was not a monster and the evidence of individual murder was slight.

Here then are two instances of an impoverished imagination accompanied by deep anxiety. First, Eichmann, obviously lacked the imagination to comprehend or deal with the appalling consequences of his plans for countless individuals, families and communities. (He had, Arendt said, “a horrible gift of consoling himself with clichés”.) Second, we often lack the imagination to look steadily at evildoers and accept that though we might never do what Eichmann (or Levi Bellfield) did, we do not belong to a different species. When it comes to evil we have a tendency to mystify it, that is reproduce unchallenging representations of it from the monster in the movie with unclean appetites for human flesh and blood, to the monstrous perverts of the tabloid press, who lurk in the darkness of our communities and prey on our children. There is visceral satisfaction to be had as a result of these representations perhaps, and money continues to be made, however banal the narrative. But the problem is, this imaginative impoverishment contributes to the serious underlying problem: a potential to become, through lack of thought – particularly the inability to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes – alienated from both others and ourselves. We run the risk of becoming – like Eichmann – lost to any genuine sense of the demanding presence of others, of their unsettling claims on us or of their problematic existences as independent beings.

The French philosopher Julia Kristeva, dealing with the cinema and its representations of evil (Intimate Revolt, 2002) believes the visual medium in particular may not demand enough of us. She suggests it runs the risk simply of appeasing us on some level without making us do the vital work of interpretation; putting our emotional responses into forms of language that allow us to become conscious of them and of ourselves as their source. She has more confidence in the work of creating our own words in order to describe, and crucially to understand what we experience. But whatever the relative merits of avant garde literature, popular film or the great works of our cultural traditions such as the Qur’an or the Geneva Convention, the bottom line is that this work of interpretation is central to our well-being as both individuals and communities. Certainly it contributes to our imaginative enrichment but more than this, it gives us the means to make sense of and deal with evil.

What does this have to do with Levi Bellfield, convicted murderer? There was nothing banal about the brutal way in which he murdered his victims, of course. But there are risks in simply relegating him to the realms of the banal – the monster whose existence is mysterious and beyond our comprehension. We really do need to know why Bellfield became a killer and why a man who has a family, who attended a London comprehensive and became a relatively successful small business man felt he had the right to take the lives of three young women he scarcely knew and to wreak such havoc in the lives of their friends and families.

The Role of the University Amplified

21 Tuesday Jun 2011

Posted by Andrew W. Hass in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 1 Comment

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A C Grayling, crisis, Critical Religion, culture, education, funding, government, higher education, humanities, liberal education, managerialism, politics, university

I return to the topic of the role of the University, addressed in my first blog (31 January 2011), because of several recent events. The first gave me reason for great applause: the 2011 Gifford Lecture (31st May), in the form of one-off public seminar entitled “The Role of the University in the 21st Century”. The second gave me reason for great pause: last week’s announcement of A.C. Grayling’s new private university in London.

The first, made up of a panel of five speakers within the academy, finally began to address and debate the fundamental question of the University’s identity in our present culture and economic climate, precisely the question I had been calling for. Since others have given a synopsis of this event (see http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14887, e.g.), I will not go into further detail here. But it was clear in talking to colleagues and panel members afterwards that this was only a start. No solutions were proffered, no blueprints for the future drafted. This was simply an opportunity to get the central issues, beyond just the headline tag lines of cutbacks and pending HE white papers from governments, out on the table for scrutiny. And I was delighted to see such strong and passionate discussion in the form of a much needed diagnostic.

The second, Grayling’s announcement of his New College of the Humanities, an independent, elite, for-profit university, employing high profile lecturers across a select range of disciplines and charging fees (£18,000) double the highest rates to be charged in England under the coalition government’s recent tuition fee ceiling rise, has provoked an intense reaction from those within and without academia, and not least from those at Grayling’s own institution, Birkbeck College, University of London. There is much one could say about the reaction alone, and Grayling’s own defence, as chronicled in the Guardian. But the principle of moving towards the wholly private university here in the UK does raise some concern. The idea of an independent university is not inherently wrong; one can see many good reasons for wanting to get out of reliance on public funding and government control, especially with the growing attitudes we’ve seen in Westminster over the last several governments (regardless of party). But the long-term consequences, as we can see from the American model, would be significant: the idea of the world-renowned British university education, which has maintained some relative degree of consistency, would give way to a great disparity in HE offering, far more than what is being threatened with current coalition policy. The elite institutions would become more elite, and infinitely more expensive, while the lesser institutions would become more parochial, and more interest-driven. In America this has led to a vast institutional difference in quality between degrees with the same name, but here in Britain it would also lead to a further classism. The quality of one’s education would be so much more dependent on the money one has before a degree is even started. As much as Grayling’s new model tries to encourage equality through competitive means-tested scholarships, we all know how these work, especially in a for-profit structure: privilege begets privilege, and means-testing becomes so quickly adjusted to the higher scale of those who have gained the competitive edge through previously having more than others. Grayling’s elite college will simply become an independent Oxbridge, a Harvard or Princeton only the wealthiest can afford. This may be what Grayling wants: a place to produce the cultural elite. But if we exclude Oxbridge, the cultural elite is not what the publicly-funded British university system was ever intended for. Its strength, at least until recently, has relied precisely on the fact that it provided a more equitable opportunity for all its citizens to be grounded in some form of tertiary education. And no more than in Scotland, where undergraduate education is still offered for free.

Of course, as I suggested in my January comments, the democratisation of HE on an economic model – the university understood primarily as an engine of the economy – has become self-defeating. If the State wants to invest in universities because they are seen as the chief provider of the workforce for a knowledge-based economy, then it will naturally demand more control of its output, and impose greater and greater pressure to corporatize and managerialize their systems. And by doing this, it quantifies education: in operational terms, accountability becomes predicated upon (fiscal) efficiency, while in pedagogical terms, learning and teaching become predicated upon professional ends alone, particularly towards the attainment of a sufficient enough salary (£21,000, under the government’s new regulations) to begin paying off the massive student debt accrued while gaining a degree. Here, economisation begets economisation: a student has no choice but to think of her or his education solely in terms of the market. But if everyone is doing this, then a simple undergraduate degree, in supply and demand logic, will begin to mean very little. The system implodes upon market saturation. And we are back asking the question: what good is a university degree for? And more fundamentally, what good is a university for?

We need to get beyond the paradigm of the university and its degrees solely as an economic good. But I am not convinced privatisation is the way forward, especially in Britain, where classism requires much less excuse to recrudesce, and would wring its hands at the thought of more private elite academies. How might the governments of the British Isles continue to think about universities in terms of publicly-funded institutions, without burdening them further with the task of chief contributor to economic development and sustainability? How might governments justify funding the HE sector, without requiring corporate accountability that necessitates fiscal streamlining and only economically viable subject areas? How might governments give back the university its historical autonomy, while still being convinced that such autonomy is a good, sound, even if not immediately quantifiable, investment?

I want here briefly to suggest four ways in which governments and academics alike might rethink their view of the university’s role, towards a more robust understanding of what overall purpose tertiary education might serve in today’s (Western) world. Each of these ways has an analogue in government thinking and policy that exist already, but thinking and policy not directly intended to maximise national economic interests. If governments would be willing to place the university under these analogous policy approaches, we might extricate ourselves from the self-defeating path the present policies on HE are doomed to follow.

The first is heritage. The university has long been a place, and creation, of heritage, of preserving what has been passed on to us, and what is valuable in and of its own right. Just as the monasteries, from the 6th C onwards, and out of which the idea of a medieval university eventually grew, were the preservers of ancient texts, and the developers of skills and practices that not only aided in that preservation, but allowed the old to be appropriated in new contexts, so too our universities have been the preservers of much of our most cherished knowledge, whether textual or otherwise, and have gone out of their way to allow the old to be appropriated in the new. What if governments looked at the universities as heritage sites? The British governments fund and support heritage sites around the UK not because they produce economic wealth (though income generated from tourism is not negligible), but because they have intrinsic value that goes deep into what it means to be British (Scottish, English, Welsh, or Irish), and what it means to have a rich and unique culture. What if governments took UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention mandate – “nature conservation and the preservation of cultural properties” – and applied it to universities? Here both the sciences (natural and social) and the humanities (along with the arts) would be seen as having intrinsic worth for their own cultural sake, and not because they necessarily add to economic prosperity.

The second is cultivation. The analogue to agriculture is obvious: every nation is highly invested in developing, sustaining and renewing its natural resources, primarily to furnish its own people with the necessities for living – food, clothing and shelter – but also to bolster its own GDP through exports. In the turn towards knowledge-based economies, governments have increasingly seen the mind as a natural resource, cultivated in the classrooms of primary, secondary and tertiary education. And the mind is certainly something to be cultivated, whether for professional means or otherwise. But with growing ecological concerns, development is now having to be balanced with sustainability and renewability. Nature, we have come to realise, is not a place for pillaging or exploiting without some serious deleterious consequences. Neither is the mind. Its development needs to be balanced with ideas and skills that are not strictly for instrumental and economic ends. Think of climate change: governments invest a lot of time and money fashioning and signing treaties to limit factors seen to damage our environment, at some cost to their GDPs and GNPs. The mind, too, needs to be seen with such balance. It is not just about cultivating a task-oriented faculty, employable only in prescribed contexts with quantifiable output. It is also about cultivating an intellect and an imagination, renewable in different contexts, perhaps even at the cost of immediate quantification and utility. The Germans, those masters of instrumental engineering, but to whom we also owe the invention of the modern university, have a wonderful word for this kind of comprehensive cultivation: Bildung. It can mean not only education, but a cultivation of an inner sense of what it means to be a human being physically, psychologically, morally, and spiritually, and a social sense of how that human being should engage with the world. It links cultivation and culture through creating, shaping, maturation and harmonization. The university needs to be seen once again as a ground for this kind of cultivation, now with a certain “intellectual ecology” in place.

The third is critique. This is perhaps the least expected way to conceive of the university, but in many ways the most immediately imperative. The university needs to remain a place of critical reflection on the ways we are told reality has been in the past, reality presently is today, and reality ought to be in the future. To do this, it must retain a strong degree of autonomy or “liberation”, i.e. freedom from control by the state, business and any other extrinsic seats of authority (church, international organisations, etc.). In this sense, we need to be able to speak of the “liberal sciences” as much as the “liberal arts”. If we relinquish this autonomy, as we are being forced to do under the economisation model, what space is left to challenge the very assumptions that are being imposed upon us, that we are expected to take for granted, including the assumption that the principle role of the university is to be an engine of the economy? The site of this very blog, Critical Religion, is a good example of attempting academic critical exploration: it is not a matter of exorcizing religion as an out-moded way of thinking or practice, but on the contrary, of exercising our very conceptions of religion to see how certain thoughts and practices, which may have once been seen as exclusively religious, are entwined with other modes of thinking and practice in today’s complex world. The analogue here to government might seem difficult to ascertain, for what government invites constant critique of its own operations? But, outside of dictatorships, most governments operate with precisely such mechanisms in place. In our own parliamentary system we have an official opposition party, who sits directly opposite the government to call its thinking and policy to account. The best governments, we know, are those not with an unrestrained mandate to do whatever they wish, but those held in check by strong and responsible opposition. What, then, if governments saw the universities as a kind of shadow cabinet on world affairs, past and present? Such a cabinet may not, and perhaps should not, have direct control over those affairs, but it should have much to say about the state of their health, and should influence them accordingly.

The fourth is creativity. Here the analogue is straightforward: governments invest much in national arts organisations. And at least here in Britain, governments do not expect to have direct, or even indirect, influence on the creative processes of those organisations. What if Westminster dictated to the National Theatre exactly what kind of plays it must commission or mount each season, or restricted BBC television to shows that in no way challenged or satirised the ruling culture? We are not naïve to think there is no influence whatsoever with state-run arts in the UK. But its governments know that in granting their funding they must also grant a great deal of autonomy to each organisation, if they are to survive the market. For the creative world is not about legislation and order. It is about allowing the artist’s voice to come forward in whatever creative form he or she feels most relevant, most powerful, most penetrating. The university has always been a place of immense creativity, not only within the arts, but within all manner of disciplinary enquiry. Scientists tell us some of the greatest breakthroughs in research come through creative moments that are not hypothesised or predicted. The arts are continually reliant upon people educated in humanities subjects that have no direct utilitarian purpose, other than to expose one to aesthetic or philosophical traditions (among others) and to then encourage the development of new creative traditions, or expressions, or ways of thinking. All governments know the arts are a crucial part of the cultural fabric of any society, and British governments especially are willing to take a loss, as it were, to ensure such fabric remains rich and variegated. What if the universities were seen as part of this same cultural fabric? They might generate certain “industries” with economic benefit; but their real benefit lies in the on-going creative energy and spirit that contribute to a much wider cultivation we spoke of above. As others have said, “That capability that leads to economically significant outcomes is derivative from a deeper creativity.”♦ The sooner governments can understand and accept this, the sooner the university can function to the full extent inherent in its very name: a universe undergoing constant re-creation.

This fourfold way of rethinking the university and its purpose cannot, by any means, be exhaustive. But perhaps it might be a start for those in offices of power, and who control funding from the public purse, to understand the university beyond the restrictive, and ultimately self-defeating, parameters set by the economic and business paradigms. After all, their own governmental structures and policies allow for interests well outside the immediate generation of measurable wealth. The university needs to be part of these interests. The poets, the theologians, the philosophers, even the pure mathematicians, all keep telling us there are some things that cannot be measured. We need to safeguard, as our public duty, and not merely as our private privilege, the place where such voices can still be heard, studied, and inflected.

(♦ Geoffrey Boulton and Colin Lucas, “What are Universities For?” (September 2008). After I had written my January 2011 blog with an almost identical title, someone pointed out to me this article, written two and a half years earlier, and under the auspices of LERU, the League for European Research Universities. The authors are from the University of Edinburgh and of Oxford respectively.)

Questioning ‘the global resurgence of religion’

30 Monday May 2011

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Critical Religion, global, international relations, religion, secular

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

Posted by Bashir S. in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Biblical criticism, crisis, Critical Religion, culture, gender

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

Posted by Richard H. Roberts in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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crisis, Critical Religion, patriarchy, patrimonialism, religion, sociology of religion, theology

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

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Africa, al Qaida, Christian, civilisation, clash of civilisations, Critical Religion, culture, global, hybridity, Muslim, Osama bin Laden, religion, South East Asia

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

Posted by CRA Editor in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Africa, body, Critical Religion, culture, gender, Muslim, performance, politics, religion, sport, women

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.)

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Sport, Politics and Religion