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The Category of “Religion” in Organizing Contemporary Societies

21 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Turku

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British sociologist of religion, James A. Beckford, writes on the opening page of his 2003 book Social Theory and Religion that “disputes about what counts as religion, and attempts to devise new ways of controlling what is permitted under the label of religion have all increased” (Beckford 2003, 1). He calls this de-regulation of religion and sees the development as one of the hidden ironies of secularization.

So far some scholars have responded to the situation Beckford sketches, but the mainstream study of religion has not. Scholars, such as David Chidester, Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Russell T. McCutcheon and others, have analysed the formation of the modern discourse on religion and suggested that it has had two main functions. First, it has supported colonialism by distributing Western meaning systems elsewhere and, more specifically, “religion” has been a tool for deciding how to treat colonized people (depending on whether they were regarded as having “religion” or not). Second, it has been significant for the formation of “secular” nation-states by “domesticating dissent” (McCutcheon 2005), i.e. dividing people, practices and groups into private and non-political (“religious”) and public and political (“secular”) spheres.

The formation of the modern discourse on religion is still in operation in contemporary societies. That is why studies focusing on it are relevant not only for understanding the past, but they help us in analysing today’s situation as well. If Beckford is correct in suggesting that disputes about what counts as religion have increased, we need to pay more attention to recent negotiations and demarcations and see how, where and why the disputes take place.

One of the cases I have studied and written more extensively elsewhere (Taira 2013) dealt with a Jedi Knight who was escorted out of the Jobcentre in Southend in south-east England in 2010, because he refused to take his hood off. Job seeker Chris Jarvis, white young adult, claimed that his Jedi religion requires him to wear his hood up in public places.

Jarvis made an official complaint and three days later he was apologised to by the personnel. The printed apology from the Jobcentre Plus manager stated:

“I was sorry to hear of your recent experience and have investigated the issue you have raised. Jobcentre Plus is committed to provide a customer service which embraces diversity and respects customer’s religion or belief. I would like to apologise that on this occasion you were asked to remove your hood which you have stated is not acceptable as part of your religious belief.” (Levy 2010)

This apology was followed by the media coverage of the case. For Jarvis, this was his “Jerry Springer moment”, a short experience of fame of a person whose social status is low. I have analysed the motives and justification of Chris Jarvis’s claims in detail elsewhere (Taira 2013), but it is important to note that his statements were explicitly directed towards minorities who have gained dress-code exemptions on the basis of “religiosity”, thereby suggesting that increased immigration and discourses about diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism and so on – not only secularization – are important factors in understanding the dynamic of current negotiations over “religion”. Furthermore, without reference to Jediism as a religion and its requirement to wear a hood up, who would listen to Chris Jarvis? Claiming Jediism as his religion gave him a voice and made it count, at least to some extent.

The media cannot prevent Jedis making claims on the basis of “religion”, and the media cannot prevent the Jobcentre from apologising, but the media are more powerful than Mr Jarvis or the Jobcentre in offering the framework for interpreting the case. The tongue-in-cheek style of newspaper coverage indicates that the media makes a distinction between serious or real religions and fake or inauthentic ones, thus downplaying the opinion of Chris Jarvis and maintaining the existing discourse on religion.

What happened with Chris Jarvis is just one case, but it provides some ideas about the prospects for future studies. Scholars can look at the media, courtrooms, government policy debates, healthcare, prisons, army and schools. They are venues where disputes about “religion” are held. Rather than jumping into the debate and suggesting that X is essentially religious or secular, authentic or fake, scholars can ask, what is at stake in these disputes? Why do some people and groups want to be classified as “religious” or (nonreligious) “secular” and why is the issue negotiated at all. What are people trying to achieve by making claims about religiosity? Who benefits?

There is not only an increase in disputes about what counts as religion or religious, but a qualitative shift I call here – for the sake of argument, at least – a reflexive moment. People are strategically and often quite consciously claiming to have a “religion” (or, in other cases, denying it), depending on the practical purpose it may serve. In this sense, the category of “religion” has to face its own modern history. Consequently, “religion” becomes ever more contested and a disputed category in various public institutions.

Scholarly standpoints in the study of religion are often divided between those who see some analytic value in the concept of religion and those who see “religion” as a discursive item to be analysed. This debate is often re-framed as a distinction between realism (or critical realism) and social constructionism (see Schilbrack 2014). I think that the issue is more complicated, because it is possible to be a realist or critical realist and challenge the analytic value of religion as a theoretical concept. Therefore, while the link between social constructionism and studying discourses on religion is common, it is not necessary. Likewise, the link between critical realism and seeing analytic value in the category of “religion” is common, but not necessary. Furthermore, it is possible to say that religion may have some heuristic value in specific research projects, while proposing that the study of discourses on religion is significant. Moreover, even those who think that religion has analytic value and/or regard themselves as realists or critical realists can usually see the significance of studies focusing on the disputes revolving around “religion” and how society is organized by classifying certain people, groups, ideas and practices as “religious” or “nonreligious”. This means that my intention here is to redirect the debate and to emphasise the significance of studying how society is organized by discourses on religion, not to defend either critical realism or social constructionism. The practical problem is that, for reasons that are not clear to me, it is a small minority who is actually doing such studies.

Study of the category of “religion” in society is not just one possible research interest among others. It is crucial for providing case studies for a more general theoretical reflection of study of religion. Furthermore, and contrary to the voices who claim that a critical approach to the category of religion is destroying its institutional basis and the social relevance of the study of religion, I see it also as one way by which to make our work relevant outside academia.

Media representations of ‘religion’ in the Middle East

26 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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It is almost a truism to note that if the mainstream media is our only source of news regarding anything to do with religion (however that might be conceived) in the Middle East, or even the Middle East in general, we are in deep trouble.  Two acute reminders of this in the last week indicate to me just how problematic these things are.  Confusion about what is and what is not ‘religious’ is one of the key issues here.

The death on 17.3.12 of Pope Shenouda III, the leader for four decades of the Coptic Church, resulted in considerable confusion and demonstrable ignorance from many.  For example, an otherwise excellent Egypt correspondent for Al Jazeera, Evan Hill, put out this message on Twitter:

Shenouda’s house arrest in a desert monastery played a key role in defining the way he interacted with the political hierarchies and the importance he gave to monasticism.  Shenouda’s reluctance to criticise President Mubarak until shortly before his downfall is in part, no doubt, related to the fact that it was Mubarak who restored Shenouda to his former position, as I noted here.  Evan Hill, and Al Jazeera in general, are excellent sources of Middle East news – but this kind of thing does not reflect well on him or the network (though see my additional note below).

My second reminder concerned the BBC and UK broadcast news in general: on Thursday 23.3.12 I had the privilege of chairing an event for the Scottish Palestinian Forum at which Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow University Media Group discussed the new book he and Mike Berry have written, More Bad News from Israel (2011) – a follow-up volume to their ground-breaking Bad News from Israel (2004).  The book covers UK TV news, and addresses the ignorance and imbalance in reporting that is anecdotally obvious to many, but substantiated with detailed statistical analysis by Philo, Berry and their team: even the audience at Thursday’s event, many of them already knowledgeable about the situation in the region and aware of the bias in the media, were shocked by some of the data that Philo discussed in his presentation and the questions afterwards.  Philo argued that a central issue is the failure to explain, or explain adequately, the context for news stories: the terms ‘military occupation’, ‘land expropriation’ and so on are hardly ever mentioned.  One of the most remarkable findings that emerged from the first edition of the book was that a significant number of people in the UK, from all socio-economic backgrounds, thought the Palestinians, not the Israelis, were the ones illegally occupying territory – an astonishing success on the part of the Israeli propaganda machine.

Of course, it is not only interesting to observe such bias and ignorance, but to ask where it originates.  After all, the Israeli government knows what it is doing, and has always done so: the issue of stolen land is key.  Philo cites Moshe Dayan in his book (and did so in his presentation), one of the key Israeli military figures in the early years of the conflict, who in 1956 at the funeral of an Israeli soldier famously said:

Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.

This kind of discourse is almost completely absent in the contemporary news media in our country.  It is certainly not a part of the BBC or ITV; Channel 4 News is slightly better.  In part, Philo explained, this is because the media reframe the conflict in terms that distract from the core issues of occupation, irredentism and discrimination.  One part of this reframing is to put it in ‘religious terms’ – the most common being that this is a conflict of Muslims against Jews.  Of course, this not only ignores the Christian Palestinian population who suffer under the occupation as much as their Muslim neighbours, but it also makes the conflict seem irrational: the Israeli propaganda enterprise (led by the Israeli government’s Orwellian-sounding ‘National Information Directorate) helps to further the notion that there is an intrinsic, irrational hatred on the part of Muslims against Jews: that if only the Palestinians would stop firing rockets, the Israelis would not ‘need’ to take reprisal action. That the Israelis tend to be the ones to instigate each round of the conflagration is ignored: my students are shocked when I tell them that the 2009 attack on Gaza by Israel, dubbed ‘Cast Lead’, began the previous year when the Israelis initiated an attack on Gaza on the day of the US presidential election – of course, the world’s media did not notice!  Instead Palestinian rocket attacks are presented as ‘irrational’.  Whether we approve of the use of violence or not, they are anything but irrational: under international law, resistance to illegal occupation is permitted, including through the use of force, and the rockets are an expression of that resistance when few other avenues for resistance appear to have any effect on Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.  There is, of course, a connection here to Naomi Goldenberg’s idea of religion as a vestigial state: if the conflict is about Muslims (a ‘religion’) against Jews (another ‘religion’) rather than Israelis oppressing Palestinians, it plays into the static and ahistorical nonsense propagated by the supporters of the ‘clash of civilisations’.

Such a reframing is in part, at least, a category error: not so much in that it wrongly ascribes the conflict to the ‘religious’ rather than the ‘political’ sphere – as much discourse has it – but in that it creates a distinction between these two as if they are opposing aspects of a self-contained and ontological binary.  We do not see such a distinction in other areas.  For example, economics correspondents reporting the UK budget last week explicitly discussed the party political consequences and not just the economic impact of the government’s decisions.  But the division between ‘religious affairs’ and ‘current affairs’ in media reporting is deeply problematic, and is surely in part a factor in Evan Hill’s ignorance about the profound importance of Shenouda’s relationship with Mubarak, as well as the distortions that emerge in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  We need a media that not only has the courage to address issues appropriately – the BBC, for example, as a public service broadcaster, is legally obliged to discuss Palestinian and Israeli views – but that also understands the damage that is done to media reporting when distinctions are made that reinforce or reify category distinctions, rather than diminish or subvert them.

 

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Additional note: I stated above that Al Jazeera is an excellent news service for the Middle East and global news.  There is one important caveat to this praise: it has significant failings in reporting on its immediate home turf.  Critical engagement with Qatar, or even near neighbours such as Bahrain, does not happen.  This is not unlike Russia Today: a serious news service for anything other than internal news about Russia.  It is notable, however, that the BBC’s failings extend beyond reporting on issues in the UK (a whole other issue!), but also to areas such as the Middle East.