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

11 Thursday Aug 2011

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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

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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.)

Questioning ‘the global resurgence of religion’

30 Monday May 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patriarchy, Patrimonialism – and Paradigm Change

08 Sunday May 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

02 Monday May 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sport, Politics and Religion

18 Monday Apr 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A polemic on the World Interfaith Harmony Week

28 Monday Mar 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praying For Japan

21 Monday Mar 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth

21 Monday Feb 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performative prayer and ‘comparing’ religion

14 Monday Feb 2011

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It is often acknowledged that Christian tradition in what we commonly call ‘the West’ was transformed after the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian: what had been a subversive and marginalised practice originating with a poor man at the insignificant edge of the Roman Empire became part of the imperial power structures.  This intimate connection of Christian belief with the exercise of power persists: think, for example, of Anglican bishops exercising power in the British House of Lords (even that connection with lords is deeply problematic for many).  Christian complicity with power has often been criticised for underpinning patriarchy, colonialism, racism and other forms of oppression.  Stanley Hauerwas and others describe this as ‘Constantinian Christianity’.

One of the consequences of Constantinian Christianity is what we might call the privatisation of belief, by which I here mean that only forms of practice supportive of existing power structures can take place in the public sphere, whereas practices that might question such power are repressed and consigned to the private sphere.  For example, whilst in Britain both Houses of Parliament are routinely opened with prayer, attempts to engage in prayers of protest outside nuclear submarine bases often result in arrests.  Such connections with power – and resistance to it – manifest themselves in other contexts too, as we have had the opportunity to witness these last few days in Egypt.  Egypt’s revolution has not been an ‘Islamic revolution’, but Islam has been used by some protesters as a powerful tool to subvert the dominant paradigm.

Though direct comparisons between ‘Constantinian Christianity’ and the situation in Egypt are extremely problematic (as I’ll explain below), it is not unreasonable to note the ‘Constantinian’ nature of Mubarak’s regime, which, building on measures by his predecessors Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdul Nasser, sought to control every area of public life, including the mosque and the church.  For example: Ahmed al Tayeb, the head of Al Azhar, one of the world’s premier institutions of Sunni scholarship, was a loyal Mubarak supporter and senior member of the National Democratic Party (none of the three claimed attributes in that name were in any way connected to reality), and both Tayeb and his predecessor, Sheikh Mohammad Sayed Tantawi, had been appointed by the president, resulting almost automatically in a certain measure of complicity with the regime.

Despite these factors, after the internet in Egypt was turned on again after several days of disconnection, reflections on resistance from within Al Azhar began to emerge.  This short text regarding an appropriate response to the protests is clear about the way in which Muslims could respond to the protests:

A person may ask “How can we help them when some of them (who are protesting) are not religious?”

The principles of this religion, particularly enjoining the good and forbidding the evil, proves that we should be in the aid of anyone who works towards establishing a good or eradicating an evil, even if they are corrupt themselves. This is because we all, collectively, are included in the statement of Allah: “And cooperate in righteousness and piety, but do not cooperate in sin and aggression.” (Qur’an, 5:2)

The revolution has been notable for the diversity of the participants, but resistance has at times incorporated Muslim practice, perhaps building on opinions such as that from Sheikh Muhammad Abdul Maqsood quoted here.  This video clip of protesters in Cairo overcoming the armed security services is well worth watching to the end (it’s just under 10 minutes long).  Note the use of prayer beginning at about 3:25: even though the might of the forces railed against the protesters (including the violence of the water cannon) may have led them to feel a need for prayer, in this setting it is anything but a ‘privatised’ action.  It is a performative act that serves to temper the aggression of the security forces who are directly facing the praying protesters, even as they are being attacked by the water cannon.  Towards the end of the video, from about 8:15 onwards, the protesters successfully take the bridge, and many of them engage in renewed prayer.

For those seeking to compare Christian and Muslim prayer using examples such as these, many traps await, from Orientalism and racism, to methodological dead ends and intellectual dishonesty.  The suggestion that we can equate what Christian and Muslim prayer means and does in these contexts is far from helpful in trying to understand what is taking place here.  The parallels we can observe centre most dramatically on the extent to which these power structures seek to claim for themselves hegemony over all areas of life, and the creative ways in which such claims might be subverted.  Whilst in no way seeking to diminish the power of the prayer for the participants, the performative nature of the Cairo protest perhaps works because the security forces recognise what is happening and it undermines the connection between the power they represent and the (supposedly) privatised practice that Muslims are expected to engage in.  We are likely to understand such situations more readily by examining the social and political pressures involved for both the protesters and the security forces, rather than seeking to make broad statements equating Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices.