Tag Archives: religious studies

Comment on the high court challenge to the new Religious Studies GCSE curriculum in England

16 Monday Nov 2015

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The Education Acts in England and Scotland (1945 & 1946) established that all children and young people at school should take ‘religious education’ and begin each day with some kind of act of ‘religious observance’.  Although the Acts are now sometimes observed ‘more in the breach’ – anecdotal evidence suggests –   this is still the case officially across the UK today.

There has always been a minority view since 1945 that ‘religion’ is not an appropriate subject to study at school in a ‘secular’ age. More recently however the content of RE curricula has changed in response to concerns about its ‘confessional’ character and people are accustomed to the idea that the content of RE now relates to a neutral treatment of ‘world religions’ rather than to the inculcation of a particular set of teachings, beliefs or practices.  Now another point of contention seems to have emerged. A group composed of parents and young people supported by the British Humanist Association (BHA) is going to court to challenge the government’s most recent revised curriculum for Religious Studies in England and Wales at GCSE level.

One argument appears to be that such a limited description of ‘world religions’  (typically in recent years only six recognized ‘major world religions’ are studied in the UK context) gives the impression that within the school curriculum, issues of truth and morality are predominantly if not exclusively addressed here and that ‘non-religious world views’ are somehow discriminated against as inferior. This view is understandable given the ways in which we use the terms ‘religion’, ‘non-religious’ and ‘the secular’ and this is something that a group of scholars associated with the term ‘critical religion’ have been working on in recent years. They have come up with the idea that this language does not simply describe several equitable positions or entities existing in the world that – as seems to be the demand in this case – should all have their place in terms of educational policy making and the curriculum. Tim Fitzgerald of Stirling University has argued for example that

‘…religion is a power category that, in dialectical interplay with other power categories such as ‘politics’, ‘science’ or ‘nature’, constructs a world and our own apprehensions according to the interests of private property, and the various beliefs, institutions and practices that have come into the world to protect private property.’

The BHA and the parents and young people they are supporting in this case may thus  be justified in their concern about the associations of ‘religion’ with notions of truth, conscience and morality that are arguably still significantly informed in policy contexts  by a privileged view of its meaning as explored by Fitzgerald for example.  By excluding humanism from the context of ‘religion’ in the curriculum, the BHA might quite reasonably argue they are thus  being excluded from a point of privileged moral and ethical reference in British society. At the same time, we could  say that the terms ‘religion’ and ‘the religious’ continue to act in British society to describe a sphere of influence that is subordinate.  Its proper concerns are determined by their distinction from ‘the secular’ within an essentially hierarchical binary. The sphere of ‘religion’ is viewed as contributing to a legitimate if subsidiary and largely privatized social and cultural richness or diversity, but there is little doubt in the present ideological context within British society that power in the public realm lies with values and institutions that are generally identified as ‘secular.’

In consequence the appellants seem at once justified and unjustified in their case.  Humanism does seem as worthy of study as, for example, Christianity or any other of the ‘six major religions’.  On the other hand, it is difficult to know what is to be achieved by trying to establish humanism as an equivalent to the other ‘world religions’ or even in terms of the synonymous  ‘world view’ whilst the RE curriculum continues systematically to exclude any discussion of the fascinating and not very neutral, normative concerns of contemporary society currently elevated in contrast as ‘secular’.

In other words whilst there seems to be an issue here about discrimination and the equitable recognition of diversity, there is perhaps an even more profound issue about the entire discursive language of religion/non-religion/secularity that in policy terms has already powerfully limited the possible differences of truth, conscience and morality with which young people can be encouraged to engage in school RE curricula, revised or otherwise.

Religious education or indoctrination: an evening of lively discussion

24 Monday Nov 2014

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[Picking up on the debate at Stirling University on 23.10.14, the introductory blog to this topic by Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, the contribution by Sarah Clark, and the first comment piece by Russell Hunter, Tim Fitzgerald here offers our final piece on this specific event.  We hope you have found all of these contributions helpful in thinking about the wider debate on RE in schools, and not just in the Scottish context. – Michael Marten, Editor]

The organisers should be thanked and praised as far as the idea of the forum is concerned. Clearly it was a legitimate forum for local teachers, parents, theology professors and Liberal Christian ministers to express their feelings and ideas about the goods and the bads of RE in school. The forum rightly included a representative of secular humanism. The problem for me is that secular humanists talk the binary reverse of what the religionists talk, and thus challenge nothing, because the circularity of the discourse is maintained. This binary discourse centred around ‘religion’ and ‘non-religion’ ensures the circular rehashing of the same persistent, un-deconstructed discourse whose deadening ubiquity stops us all thinking new thoughts.

Our very own Sarah Clark had something powerful and original to say, but the chair and the other speakers failed to pick it up. Sarah referred to the ‘cognitive dissonance’ she experienced between teaching RE in school and studying critical religion at Stirling University. This led her to make a career change. This significant content seemed to be of no interest to the chairperson or to any of the other speakers, despite the lavish praise and the mutual love-in and prize-winning ceremony at the end.

True, I am more on the academic side of the topic of ‘religion’, but, as a result of the urging of others, I imagined that this might be a forum where I could learn something and perhaps also make some useful connections between what we do in critical religion at Stirling and ideas about how RE in schools might be rethought to give it critical relevance.  However I cannot in all honesty say that anything at all was advanced by this event – from my own perspective at least – and indeed it may have done some damage. I feel disappointed at the way this debate was staged and conducted.

Sarah received loud applause when she went to the podium to speak, yet none of the organisers or other speakers seemed alerted by this that a sizeable number of undergraduates, and several postgraduates and lecturers were present, or that we might have anything worthy to contribute. Two lecturers in particular – Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, have published interesting contributions to the topic of RE, but these do not seem to have been mentioned.

You cannot have everyone on a panel, and the organisers have the right to choose who they want to be there. Yet neither Alison nor John were acknowledged from the platform and nor were the rest of us from the Stirling religion subject area. The many religion students and lecturers in the audience seemed to be invisible and inaudible to those up on the platform and to those of the organisers who were sitting in the front row. I felt that I was intruding into someone else’s private assembly, and I began to wonder why my wife and I were there, and why I had urged my students and postgraduates to attend – some coming from as far away as St Andrews and Edinburgh.

Some people may now want to organise a counter-debate, preferable led by a combination of current RE teachers in schools and critical religion students at Stirling, especially those who, like Sarah, intend – or intended – to teach RE in school. Yes, we need all the constituencies to participate. It seems potentially more creative to try to bring the academic subject area and the school curriculum into some kind of direct, creative tension. After all, that is exactly what Sarah Clark was talking about: the dissonance between the two.

I believe and hope that what we do successfully in the religion subject area at Stirling is to deconstruct the empty and confused rhetoric around religion and secularity, and show how it serves wider power agendas that tend to remain half-hidden in the background.  But I recognise the need for caution. I suspect that many teachers and parents, whose legitimate concerns are with the actualities of the school curriculum, will be puzzled by how we proceed, and slow to recognise the relevance of deconstructing discourses on religion. It would be unhelpful if the ‘lively discussion’ split into a false assumed dichotomy of realists and idealists – the idealists being those supposedly privileged academics like myself who live and teach abstractions that have no bearing on the supposed realities, and the realists being the teachers who do the immensely difficult job working within the externally imposed realities of the curriculum.  This is, I believe, yet another of those either-or binaries that keep us stupefied and ensure that nothing new can be thought. I would not go cold into that forum. It needs to be prepared. A space could be made for what we do at Stirling, even if it is only trying to clear the conceptual rubble so evident that evening.

What is education and what is indoctrination? Reflections on the RE debate

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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[Picking up on the debate at Stirling University on 23.10.14, the introductory blog to this topic by Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, and the contribution by Sarah Clark, Russell Hunter, a Masters student at Stirling University, here offers his thoughts on the debate.  There will be one more comment piece next week. – Michael Marten, Editor]

After discussing with Dr. Fitzgerald the terms and use of education/indoctrination programs, I was excited to attend this panel discussion. I listened intently to the four panelists and came away from each of their presentations wanting to hear a bold statement. Was the current system about education or was it about indoctrination? They tiptoed around this issue.

Professor James Conroy came the closest to addressing it, but what did he mean when he said, “You cannot educate if a culture is not willing to learn, and if indoctrination was the goal, it failed”? He further argued that “there is no link to theological questions” in the Scottish school curriculum. He used statistics from his survey findings to show that religious affiliations are decreasing among schoolchildren today, which is why there is no indoctrination. To conclude that indoctrination does not exist because religious affiliations among schoolchildren are decreasing is questionable. I would be interested to see the survey questions. The teachers surveyed may not have fully supported the presence of Religious Education (RE) in the school curriculum and were so politically correct in their delivery of it that their RE instruction had a counter-effect. Would that not amount to indoctrination?

Reverend Sally Foster-Fulton was passionate but failed to convince me of RE’s future role in Scottish schools or even clarify its future role. “Time for reflection” is a nice catch phrase that she coined. I take it to mean coalescing support for RE by drawing attention to the fact that all religions have the commonality of reflection. Be it prayer, meditation, or just quite time, time for reflection creates a common bond between each faith. She quoted the Scottish government’s policy on RE in the Scottish school curriculum. It would have been more powerful if she had clarified how schools interpret and apply this legislation and what role the church plays in all of this. That was the most confusing issue: what role does the church play? Is the government lobbying for time for reflection? If so, is that indoctrination?

Mr. Douglas McLellan of the Humanist Society of Scotland focused on the 1918 Educational Act and the Catholic schools. He was all about secular education and believed RE has no place in schools. Yet, when pushed, he said yes, we need to learn about religions and have discussions about them. He failed to lay out how this is to be accomplished. He railed against the denominational school system but not against the nondenominational system. From my perspective, his presentation was one-dimensional and unfair. If a parent wants to put a child into a denominational school because of religious beliefs, why should Mr. McLellan object? It is possible I am not sufficiently familiar with the Scottish system, but I must also ask why Mr. McLellan did not talk about the 1980 Educational Act or the 2011 guidelines on RE implementation in the school curriculum? Why was he not challenged on that issue?

Mrs. Sarah Clark spoke from personal experience. Her presentation was based on personal experiences working within the school system and critical religion at the University of Stirling. She provided a different perspective. She took an experiential approach to the subject and discussed values and beliefs that are transmitted through socialization. She talked about what she termed a “dissonance” or conflict in the way the school system addressed RE, brought about by the fact that teachers and the school system take a politically correct approach while students wanted openness. She claimed that religion is interwoven across all educational disciplines, a circumstance that schools must address. Her plan for how this could be done included classroom discussions on the impact of religion on the development of various disciplines. Her realist approach allowed her to offer a framework for the implementation of RE in the school curriculum. At least she had a plan. She was the only panelist who suggested a clear plan for implementing RE in the school curriculum.

I watched the faces and reactions of the panelists as each of them got up to speak. It was immediately obvious that the divide of opinions was wide. When Mr. McLellan was speaking, Reverend Foster-Fulton and Professor Conroy made comments to each other and mouthed words such as “not correct,” or something similar, or they shook their heads in disagreement. This behavior from someone who, just a few minutes earlier, had asked that we should all have a time for reflection seemed very disingenuous. The hard question for everyone on this panel and in the audience is the first question that should have been asked: what is the difference between education and indoctrination? If “education” as a mandated curriculum comes from a hierarchy of power, is that not a form of indoctrination? Is a secular mandate on RE in contention with itself? Or does that even matter to those who can only see from their own point of view? How ironic that the panel all agreed the exchange of ideas and customs, religions and values, is the only way to move forward and yet they were closed-minded during the debate.

Those who advocate inclusiveness don’t always show it. Surveys are only as good as the questions asked. Education and indoctrination are intertwined much as someone’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. When a secular government issues a curriculum mandate, is it not indoctrination? The panel discussion has made me aware of the complications and pitfalls of a discourse that is interwoven across various disciplines, as RE is.  More importantly it has made me question the words education and indoctrination. These words may be more alike than the panel is willing to concede.

Education or indoctrination: the future role of religion in Scotland’s schools – a student view

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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[Picking up on the debate at Stirling University on 23.10.14, and the introductory blog to this topic by Alison Jasper and John I’Anson, we’re delighted that Sarah Clark, who presented a student view at the debate, has kindly agreed to provide us with her contribution.  We will also be offering two comment pieces on the debate.  Comments are turned off on this posting, but we look forward to comments on the later postings. – Michael Marten, Editor]

I approach the question of Religion, Education and Indoctrination from the multi faceted perspective of someone who has encountered the process of religion and education from simultaneous and varying viewpoints: as a school student, as a university student, as a teacher (of sorts) and as a mother of two children currently attending a Scottish and supposedly non-denominational school.

I arrived at Stirling University in 2010 with a preconceived notion of religion and religious education that was based on my school experiences. I attended Scottish non-denominational schools throughout my education and while I do not recall encountering religion at primary school I can clearly remember it at secondary school, in particular I recall my first year, when I earned full marks for a class test on world religions. I was met at the gates the following day by a baying crowd of bullies shouting ‘Bible basher’ at me – because in the 1980s there was a common misconception that to study religion equated to ‘being’ religious. Thankfully, from a school perspective, this understanding has diminished. However, and many other students of Critical Religion may identify with this point, I do still meet peers and elders who on hearing I am studying ‘Religion’ at university say things like – ‘oh I didn’t know you were religious’ and ‘what religion are you?’.

I decided after the school incident it would be safer to avoid Religious Education altogether. What I hadn’t recognized at the time was how the school continued to provide me with a Religious Education of sorts. As per the government’s education directive and in recognition of Scotland’s Christian heritage, a particular set of norms values and beliefs were being transmitted to me in the classroom and through the schools social environment. As those of you studying Education will be aware, research has shown that through its socializing function, education inserts individuals into existing ways of doing and being. I don’t like the word indoctrinated or the term ‘hidden curriculum’ as to most of us it represents something pernicious, so I have used the word socialized here instead. However, my point is that I left school all packed up with a knowledge base built around existing ways of doing and being, a knowledge base carefully constructed by the Scottish Education system that had me believe my cultural practices (to which the word ‘Religion’ was never attached) were the status quo and that Religion was something that the others had, and that to know others is possible through knowing their Religion.

I do not suggest that this was the experience of everyone who came through the Scottish Education system but I do believe it was for the majority. How do I know this?   Firstly through the shared experiences I have had with fellow students who, on arriving at Stirling University had their carefully constructed knowledge base examined and unpacked by the department of Critical Religion. A valuable process is that it enables one to study ‘objectively’. Secondly, I know this due to the resistance I feel when attempting to share my new understandings with friends and family enquiring about my studies or passing comment about recent news events and foreign affairs.

I started my degree with the intention of becoming an RE teacher but this intention changed after my practice experience in schools. Having worked in various Government institutions (incl. social work, prison service, nursing), I was fully prepared for the disparity between the Governments directive about what will be done, the nice glossy brochure or user friendly website outlining how things will be done, and the harsh reality of what actually happens. What I was not prepared for was the cognitive dissonance I experienced when I realised how badly this disparity impacts on the subject of Religion.

The Scottish Government has issued two papers in relation to Religion in schools – one on provisions for religious observance, the other on religious education. In terms of religious observance the Directorate encourages schools to draw upon the rich resources of Scottish Christianity when planning and to recognise the students of other faiths or with no faith commitment. A challenge indeed. What my experience in my teaching placements and as a mother of two young children attending a Scottish non-denominational school shows is that a kind of P.C. approach is used that involves a complete avoidance of the word Religion, but that includes teaching and singing hymns at assembly (whilst switching the word God for joy).

Alongside but almost in opposition to this, the Directorate states that in relation to religion and class room learning, ‘through an understanding and appreciation of the world’s major religions and views, children and young people can develop responsible attitudes to other people which will assist in counteracting prejudice and intolerance’.

Between the two papers, what is essentially being said is this: ensure pupils are socialised within a Christian context (‘us’) and learn about other people through their religion (‘others’). Creating such a binary division is the backbone of ethnocentrism, in this instance parcelling up knowledge about ‘others’ under the category of Religion whilst reinforcing a ‘Christian identity’ that hasn’t been afforded the same categorisation? The very aims of the Directorate are being undermined by the incompatibility of what I consider to be a dishonest and out-dated approach. How can we acknowledge our Scottish Christian heritage without being honest about what it is we are practicing – religion – whilst categorising others and claiming to know them by applying the term to their practices? Rather than being an antidote to prejudice and racism this practice is adding fuel to the fire!

Thankfully, the glossy brochure, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, (CfE) offers an opportunity to address this issue through its ‘curriculum areas‘. There are 8 curriculum areas including expressive arts, sciences, languages, one of which is religious and moral education. These are different from subject areas: they are broad umbrella terms, and are not structures for timetabling: the intention is that each curriculum area contributes to student development through its own disciplinary context and through connections with other areas of learning. There is a strong emphasis at Stirling University for student teachers to embrace this feature of the curriculum, to work with other subject areas and find the connections between disciplines, which is wonderful. The sad reality is that many students set sail from University ready for challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary learning, only to be washed away and drowned in the sea of ‘do as your told’. The relentless drive for improved school performance, statistics and league tables, which, unfortunately is still measured by subject,-driven exam results, means that subject area still outranks curriculum area. So  what this translates to is shoe-horned and token-gesture interdisciplinary learning. And for Religious and Moral Education (RME), the shoe-horning focuses more on issues of sex, relationships, and citizenship than it does on issues of religion and faith.

So. Is there a future for Religion in Scottish non-denominational schools? Is it still relevant?

Yes. And Yes!

Recently the former First Minister of Scotland, Jack McConnell spoke at Stirling University reminding students of the importance of Arts and Humanities in what he described as an increasingly diverse and deeply complicated world. Speaking just prior to the vote on Scotland’s independence and as tensions were rising in Syria, he noted the importance of having people that can communicate in a global context and share events with others (English, languages and media), who can unravel our past (history), and shape our political future (politics). I was initially frustrated and disappointed that he had not acknowledged the importance of Religion, but then I reminded myself that the subject of Religion need not be separate. Religion is, at its nexus, an ideology, a belief system that is intertwined with and reverberates through literature, through history, through economics, social studies, politics, science and language.

The Bible, as just one example, has been a major influence on artistic themes, scientific inspiration, conflict, intertexuality, economics and political discourse throughout the last few centuries. A lack of knowledge and understanding about the text and its historical context can make teaching what on the surface might be considered an unrelated subject, far more difficult. How should schools successfully approach a subject that is so interwoven into everything we do?

What I suggest is, that to deal with a subject that is so interwoven into everything we do – we interweave the topic teachers! (I don’t mean physically sew them together of course!)

I envisage our specialist teachers working peripatetically from first to third year, moving around the school and integrating into other subject classrooms to help students identify, engage with and contextualise religion and faith issues as they encounter them. Explore the diversity and hybridity of Hinduism whilst engaging with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in English. Discuss what the Shinto tradition has to say about organ donation in Biology. Debate the international basketball association’s ban on religious attire at PE. Pupils will be allowed to focus on the subject more specifically in 4th year and even more critically in 5th and 6th year thereby safeguarding the subject qualification element and ensuring its future. But all pupils will be encouraged to engage with Critical Religion and critical thinking that takes them beyond their own belief system in all subject areas… bearing in mind that we first have to be honest about what our belief system is, instead of blurring the edges so as not to offend others.

I would encourage all RE teachers currently practicing in Scottish schools to take the amazing opportunity that the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence has presented us with before it passes us by: take advantage of the flexibility it allows, take ownership of the curriculum area and the subject of Religion in Scottish Schools and move it forward.

Is RE perhaps a terrorist activity?

25 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Thursday evening’s discussion at Stirling University ‘Education or Indoctrination:  The future role of religion in Scottish Schools,’ predictably fell, to these writers’ and minds, a little flat. But why?

Debates about RE in UK – and Scottish – schools are frequently characterised by ambivalence– in Scotland skirting around unacknowledged or unmentionable aspects of its social and economic history that come with sectarian and religious labels – and  sometimes what is reflected in them is further retrenchment rather than trenchant thinking. Arguably what emerged here were various familiar themes: the desire of hard-working committed RE teachers to encourage their students to engage with forms of wisdom (not limited to Christianity); the importance of developing  attitudes of respect and tolerance partly at least as a kind of defence against the dark arts of terrorism and fundamentalism; a lament for a lost form of theological and biblical literacy; the claim that  theological and biblical literacy enriches the appreciation of history and literature (a somewhat backhanded legitimation of RE as handmaiden to a range of more acceptable humanities?); a view that the only kind of knowledge relevant within Schools ought to be based on ‘secular’ reason and empirical science; and various attempts to define ‘religion’ as a concern with transcendence, as historical tradition as the commodification of  ‘otherness’.

In respect of this last point, the discussion was enlivened with an elegant critique of the ‘world religions’ paradigm that parcels up knowledge of ‘the other’ whilst schools continue to maintain a ‘hidden curriculum’ – actions and expectations developing a form of ‘our’ subjective, Christianised identity that acts ironically to reinforce a sense of the otherness of what we study ‘objectively’. Sarah Clark addressed the question of a possible future for the subject creatively and optimistically with suggestions for an interdisciplinarity that  would not be subordinated to the demands of a ‘policy assessment culture’ fostering rigid disciplinary boundaries. Based on her enthusiasm for the possibilities of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (2010) she began to flesh this out in terms of an idea that refreshingly, wasn’t constrained by current orderings or assumptions – proposing a more nomadic and less territorialised approach.   However, thinking on this creative level is hard to sustain and gave way for the most part to a more diffuse discussion, for example in terms of parental rights – clearly an important issue, but one with  polarising  effects that closed down rather than opened up possibilities for the exchange of ideas about the future.

What then, by way of post script to this event, do we have to contribute to this discussion?  We have previously identified the Official Account of Religious Studies  (OARS, see I’Anson & Jasper, 2006) in British Schools and Universities as one that is built on a late modernist ethos of rationality, objectivity and neutrality reflecting a substantive ontology and a rhetorics (within RE and society more broadly) characterised  by openness to multiculturalism as a social good. It seemed to us that this OARS was very much in evidence in yesterday’s discussion. (By ‘substantive ontology’ we mean the kind of normative, western and masculinist discourse which is still widely believed to be neutral whereas it is arguably a highly privileged construction.) Scholars like Smart and the organisation of RE teachers with which he was closely involved in the 1970s (the SHAP working party) took advantage of a move observable at that time, away from older confessional or narrowly moral certainties that had characterised ‘Religious Instruction’ or ‘Scripture’ before the 1980s. The approach (at secondary and higher levels) they developed was in tune with this rhetorics and substantive approach. Yet what was key here, was that this dominant approach – still detectable today – remained, at the same time as it appeared rhetorically open to difference/s, intellectually aligned within the quite rigid categorisations of what we’ve referred to here as substantive ontologies – for example in relation to the familiar western notion of ‘beliefs’.

In the academy, things have changed. There has been movement – mediated through a diffusion of broadly post structuralist approaches – towards the recognition of much more relational ontologies (Irigaray, 2004; Wildman, 2010) and this has shifted understanding from a basis in essentialised towards contextualised knowledge. Yet as a number of the speakers noted in the course of yesterday’s discussion, at the same time schools, universities and educational research more generally has  been required increasingly to conform to  structures whereby education is seen as a means to achieve measurable economic or socio-economic benefits with students and stakeholders configured as customers. At the same time there has also been a clear cooling of popular enthusiasm for differences/multiculturalism that could be associated with pressures from economic migration and the fear of international terrorism (after 9/11) in a time of austerity (after 2008). (A recent document produced in England even suggested that teachers should be wary of  students who betray too great an interest in issues of cultural difference (Coppock, 2014).) In the light of these changes, it was entirely appropriate to be having yesterday’s discussion and to be pointing to the need for new creative ideas for the future although it was clear that the framing of the event largely assumed all participants would be more or less aligned with a certain common vocabulary and disappointingly, made little allowance for the kinds of ‘interruptions’ from different perspectives that might have opened the discussion up.

The contradictions between these forces – substantive and relational ontologies – has clearly now led to a crisis of plausibility in relation to the language of RE – a fundamental failure on the part of policy makers particularly but perhaps also on the part of academics to think through the implications of the newer relational ontologies as they have revolutionised thinking about identity and difference/s in relation to lived experience as this exceeds the limited categories and essentialised knowledges produced by the substantive ontologies of the past. And this, arguably, is to some extent exemplified in  the evident disconnections between RE at primary and secondary level and many forms of theology and critical religion at higher education levels.

We do need some new thinking – perhaps an AAR (Alternative Account of Religion?) – that proposes more robustly educational rather than ideological or neoliberal justifications for maintaining space for Religion in the curriculum – perhaps as a space for critical  attentiveness to genuine and challenging difference/s and a response to ‘learnification’ (Biesta, 2008). In other words, we need to acknowledge the ways in which engaging with cultural differences will inevitably lead to, and call forth, changes to our characteristic ways of carrying on.  This will interrupt the prevailing discourse that assumes we can encounter knowledge in general and knowledge of religion in particular in purely ‘neutral’ terms.

As we envision it, we could perhaps say that the implication for yesterday evening’s discussants (and listeners), is the need for all of us to acknowledge the imbrication of religion, cultural difference/s and education and to recognise that at present the current framing at policy level remains in/different; difference/s is/are continually resolved/translated into familiar polarities that are fundamentally impoverishing.  We argue that we need then to engage urgently with the question of what is educationally desirable – to broaden the understanding of socialisation and genuinely to consider the implications for present day cultural horizons.

Alison Jasper & John I’Anson

Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Recently I have received a link in my emails to a report on Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies undertaken by Mathew Guest, Sonya Sharma and Robert Song (2013). Detailing some comparative data in the field charted against the gendered profile of the discipline, the report highlighted a number of factors that influence women’s pathway through academic study and career progression in academia that I feel are worth reiterating to our readers. While there are other Arts and Humanities-based subjects that are marked by the trends indicated in the report, in a comparison between English, Philosophy, Anthropology, Mathematics and Chemistry, the field indicated by Theology and Religious Studies (TRS) fared worst as regards a gradient decline of women enrolled in further study, or progressing through academic promotion procedures. Whereas by and large female students outnumber male students in undergraduate courses, over the course of postgraduate work, taught and research, the figures begin to tip in balance. As the study shows, ‘the drop off rate for female TRS students is more than twice that of any of these other subjects’ (12).

Of the numerous indicators gathered by the report, the ‘gradual female withdrawal in tandem with academic progression’ (4), a recurring theme was that of lacking confidence in women candidates. However, three issues stand out as especially connected to the academic subject area, rather than a patriarchal institutional culture underwriting academia at large: the recruitment strategies of some institutions that recruit from countries in which candidates are likely to be funded for their studies by their church, which may reinforce a conservative, gendered reception of Christianity also at a structural level (14). To develop the level of confidence in female students to pursue a career path in particular sub-disciplines consequently appears as comparatively more problematic. The report specifically names Systematic Theology amongst its finds (15). A second area highlighted in relation to that of recruitment from elsewhere is the connection of TRS departments with denominational affiliation, often due to supplying training for ministry for which the recruitment by the churches into ministry impacts upon the question of diversity at the university (13). And thirdly, the administrative struggle of TRS departments in their variously re-structured forms. Specifically in the complicated relationship and disciplinary distinction drawn between religious studies in a broader, often interdisciplinary field, and theology, the report noted the implications on directions for research when targeting submissions for the REF (cf. 16). All of these issues, in effect, are symptomatic of funding politics, as they come through at various stages for career progression: in recruitment, in funding further studies, and in impact assessment for career progression.

Motivation to pursue further study, in my own case here at Stirling (one of the few non-denominational schools – and one without the competing demands of classical theology), had largely been kindled by a postgraduate initiative titled “Feminine Divine” that was run over the spring term in 2009 by research postgraduates of the interdisciplinary school for Languages, Cultures and Religions at Stirling. As a first point of contact with the postgraduate community, the lively and welcoming circle of feminist postgraduates made a strong impression on me, as I shied away from approaching (our very approachable!) staff to discuss options of further study. In light of prejudices against tags such as “feminist,” highlighted in the report (8, 16), I recall the reaction of one of my friend’s parents, who upon hearing of their daughter’s participation in the group, cautiously asked if her relationship to her male partner was still all it could be. The equation between the theme “Feminine Divine,” feminism, and lesbian culture in the popular imagination gave rise to many a discussion since.

The question of funding, albeit related to other reasons and factors cited by the study, analysing the recruitment processes and circumstances of candidates, remained largely absent from their consideration – due perhaps to the focus and response of those interviewed for the report. Having been one of the 33.2% of female research postgraduate students in the figures from 2010-11 cited (9), I vividly remember the apprehension in the run-up to deadlines for funding applications after the announcement of cuts in the Arts and Humanities, that could have very well spelled the end of my own academic aspirations. The prospect, particularly in a time of economic austerity, of finding part time work that could fund tuition fees and living costs, especially if there are no family savings to meet some of the costs, is not inviting. And in retrospect, with my study all but completed, I know all too well that without funding, I would have written a different study: economic demands play crucially on the scope and outcomes of research, whichever the field.

Curiously, the report characterised Philosophy and English as two comparative reference groups for the field in light of working methods and subject matter within the Arts and Humanities, cited to aid the interpretation of the absolute figures attained from Higher Education Information Database for Institutions (HEIDI) (10). I say curiously because in the logic of funders – and certainly in the historical development of Religious Studies – TRS nestles under the rubric of Historical and Theological Research. While I do not have access to the numbers of female students progressing through a career in Historical Research, my estimate is that this line of inquiry might have found TRS less of a special case. Obviously this is not to say that it would therefore be any more acceptable to the health of the academic institutions to maintain this imbalance. The recent decision by the Church of England to allow for women bishops offers hope that a symptomatic imbalance in the ratio of male and female students and academics, that may have skewed the ratio of some institutions in the study in comparison to the national average (13), is likely to change over the coming years by providing significant role models to an aspiring generation of women scholars.

Institutions and organisations are eager to pick up discussions to maintain a strong and healthy disciplinary diversity, and the annual ‘Socrel Response Day’ on the theme ‘Achieving Gender Equality in the Academy: Intersections, Interrogations and Practices’ (October 4, 2014) in London is an event of primary importance to raising awareness and facilitating discussions that prepare responsible leadership in academia for a future in TRS. Plans and preparations for a mentoring scheme, central amongst the recommendations of the report, are encouraged in order to facilitate and prepare students and academic staff to face the challenges in pursuit of achieving gender equality in the academic engagement with TRS and beyond.

Conference Report: Women in Secularism 2

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Ottawa

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Washington, D. C., May 17-19, 2013

Washington, D. C., May 17-19, 2013

Washington, D. C., May 17-19, 2013

October 2013:
Note on Critical Religion: It is my assumption that scholars engaged in critical religion are essentially the atheists, feminists and de-colonists in the field of Religious Studies. I had dinner with a group of Religious Studies majors a few nights ago, and I was interested and somewhat disappointed to note that they generally defined ‘the religious’ as those who self-identified in that way. While Religious Studies departments can be replete with scholars drawing lines around ‘religious’ art or ‘religious’ clothes, implicitly using the adjective as an analytical category rather than as data itself, to my understanding, ‘Critical Religion’ particularly is a meta-religion-studies, looking at what people are calling ‘religion’, who is employing this label and for what reasons they are doing so. Critical Religion means examining the modern social attitude called ‘religious’, rather than apologetically calling human behaviour ‘religious phenomena’, something which does not exist, so naturally it is impossible to track or even define. Feminists have challenged and reconstructed history with a place for women within it, and de-colonists have given voice to a historically silent subaltern perspective. A large and contemporary body of work in Religious Studies is in many ways surprisingly still engaged in writing histories as (patriarchal, colonizing) Cultural Christians. Feminist and de-colonial theory, devoted to revealing and questioning unexamined systems of power, are the avenues which lead to Critical Religion. This seems to produce atheism, which is why the Women in Secularism conference series is relevant to Critical Religionists.

Atheism & Feminism

On May 17, 2013, some 50 core participants gathered at the Downtown Marriott Centre in Washington D. C. for the second annual conference about women’s involvement in secular movements. Up to 200 others attended for the keynote speakers. The conference was organized by the Centre For Inquiry, a not-for-profit organization which mobilizes on a variety of issues surrounding ‘secular’ concerns, such as scientific education in public schools, grief services for nonbelievers, and the demystification and de-vilification of all things contraceptive.

Over the course of the weekend, women engaged in atheist feminist activism had the opportunity to meet and discuss their work. Some women were best-selling authors, others scientists in the academy, and others were leaders in support groups within their communities. It is important to note that most of these women were and are actively engaged in journalistic activism via online blogs, Twitter, and other social media. (For a list of all the speakers and their lectures, click here.)

Toxic Religion and Toxic Patriarchy are the Same

Many of the activist-oriented conference speakers and panelists encouraged a coalition between the feminist movements and the secular ones, both to get more feminists to be atheists and to make the secular movement less elitist and oppressive. Essentially the secularists were engaged in convincing the feminists of the toxicity of religion and religion’s interference with the state, and the feminists were convincing the secularists that the fight to empower women is the keystone in reducing religion’s political influence. The result was feminists getting equipped with a more detailed understanding of the role of Christianity and Islam and patriarchy, and the secularists gaining a deeper appreciation for the role of feminist struggles in working towards secularism. Secularists and feminists were engaged in a process of seeing the dismantling of toxic masculinity and the dismantling of toxic religion as the same endeavour.

CFI Washington D. C.’s president and conference organizer Melody Hensley said that “issues of secular movements are issues of women’s safety and freedom.” The anti-feminist thrust of the predominant atheist movements, led by Richard Dawkins and others, suggests this is not a universal notion. Atheist groups consisting largely of wealthy, educated white males are focused on the science of anti-God-ness. Dawkins calls himself a “cultural Christian”, supporting ‘traditional marriage’ and other Christian constructions while intent on disproving the existence of an all-powerful God, male or otherwise. It follows that Dawkins supports ‘traditional’ gender roles and the idea of the father as head of the household. In this way, atheist movements may protect and inscribe oppression of women; they can erode Grand Narratives in one way, and perpetuate them in others. While I see feminism and atheism as part of the same project, it troubles me that this Dawkinsian atheism, disproving God with science, could potentially be the extent to which the secular movement goes. It is incredibly important to demonstrate the connection between the cultural institutions of Christianity and the cultural institutions of patriarchy. As Kathlyn Pollitt said, “religious texts are the rulebooks of misogyny.” Radio personality Sarah Moglia pointed out that statistically speaking, all social movements that do not reach the working classes (and women make up 70% of the world’s poor) are doomed to fail as they do not reach the institutionalization phase. The conference made clear that secularism as a social movement will not take root until it is inclusive, pervasive and skeptical, deeply penetrating not only the imaginary god but the system which both creates and is created by notions of it.

Another important discussion at this conference was that of nomenclature. There were many discussions and disagreements about what the movement should be called, how people should self-identify, and other issues which can be (and were) paralleled to the gay rights movement. I got the sense generally that although there were a few people who disliked the ‘secular’ title and preferred out-and-out atheist, there was an acceptance of allies in the movement. It was noted that as the term ‘feminist’ often precipitates a strong counter-reaction, so the word ‘atheist’ denotes criticism of the hegemonic paradigm and can’t be softened. This makes me think of Richard Cimino’s definition of atheism, which is “an oppositional identity in a culture of theism.” This oppositional identity creates many apologists, and potential allies of the secular (and women’s liberation) movements often focus on religion as a notion of ‘The Good’, or the positive effects of religions rather than the endemic oppression they inscribe. There has also been a great deal of ‘historical’ focus on religious persecution and religious freedom, and church-related abuses and violence are called ‘situational’, or ‘representative of the times’. Pollitt remarked that one need only read the Bible itself for an account of human rights abuses. The pervasive desire to imagine religion as ‘The Good’ results in a social forgetfulness that obscures the modern and political projects deploying God in state and in law. God went on the money and in the Pledge in the United States in the 1950s, and in contrast, France separated church and state in 1905. Investing the state with God-the-Father, and pretending he was always there is both anachronistic and political. Speaker and writer Jennifer Hecht notes that the feminist atheist movement needs to “establish a long history of secular women because the Christian world can be overwhelming,” and that “we have to be the ones to cultivate this memory.” When asked what the future would look like if atheist and feminist movements were successful, Pollitt responded that it would look as though atheism and feminism had always been popular. Whether or not that is the case remains to be seen, but every story told and every voice that speaks moves the discourse forward.

Critical Religion

One of the most interesting parts of this conference was that scholars of Religious Studies were not invited. The doctors of Science, Political Studies, History and Women’s Studies seemed to recognize that much of the work in Religious Studies, while likely well-intentioned, is apologetic and somewhat evangelical. Ultimately, Religious Studies scholars seem to be more committed to their subjects of study than to human rights, or perhaps conventional Religious Studies departments do not offer the anti-oppressive theoretical education which has become typical in some Social Sciences.

Critical Religionists are often adept at pointing out the flaws of our peers, but the work which is crucial to developing the movement lies in constructing better theoretical frameworks than the ones which exist currently in the field of Religious Studies. Work like Goldenberg’s Vestigial State Theory move beyond “standing in the conceptual space carved out by theistic religion” (Sam Harris, 2007). Indeed, scholars of religion are only beginning to have the language with which to describe “vestigial states called ‘religion’”. Feminist and post-colonial academic and activist circles are a fantastic place to see these developing frameworks in action; these are the frameworks that Critical Religion needs.

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Videos of the entire conference can be found here.

[Editor’s note: This article was modified on 11 April 2016 at the author’s request]

Here Be Dragons: the quest for academic credibility

21 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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At the recent BASR/EASR conference at Liverpool Hope University I spoke about dragons. My paper was on the application of Ninian Smart’s dimensions of religion to the Nine Divines. The Nine Divines is the principle “religion” to be found in the Elder Scrolls video game series and it has no meat-world presence. My argument was that the Nine Divines as a religion met all the dimensions that Smart detailed and that there were no logical grounds upon which we should not consider it a religion of as much legitimacy or reality as any meat-world counterpart (i.e. Hinduism, Islam, etc.). In short, the Nine Divines is an example of what Smart characterises as an Imperial religion: a ‘relatively loose’ organisation ‘with cities and regions for instance having their own priesthoods and cults’ (1996:237).

There was a certain amount of ludicrosity to the whole affair, something I felt acutely as I did my field research from the comfort of my own armchair. On more than one occasion I was forced to stop and ask myself “is this serious?” I mean, how many field researchers have had to deal with the problem of troll attacks as they travel to investigate what sort of items have been left as offerings at a shrine? It certainly doesn’t feel very phenomenological to bury your axe into a bandit’s face. However, this in itself was part of what fascinated me about the whole exercise. As ludicrous as it all was, going through Smart’s dimensions I found no impediment to say that the Nine Divines isn’t a real religion. The fact of the matter is that applying our scholarly assumptions and categories to the religion of a video game throws up interesting challenges that we might not have considered if we restricted ourselves to roaming the meat-world. The main question I raised in my paper was that despite the fact that there are various discussions about the reality or unreality of gods, spirits, or what have you, no scholar has every stopped to consider the reality or unreality of the practitioners. No definition of religion I can think of stipulates that the practitioners of that religion, however defined, have to have meat-world presence.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of a plethora of questions that are raised by treating the Nine Divines as a real religion. I didn’t have the time to mention them all in my paper and it is not my intention to go through them here. Rather, I want to comment on the “ludicrosity” of the whole affair. Being such a large conference with nearly eight panels running simultaneously at a time, the panel in which I presented my paper did not have a particularly large audience and none of them were prominent academics (as far as I was aware). That, and technical difficulties that led to a limitation upon discussion, meant that there wasn’t really a chance to get a feel for how other academics responded to my paper. While the other papers were also on video games I think I am the first to suggest this sort of study. So to a certain extent the ludicrosity of the study was passed by until later that evening.

Later I was among the contestants for a recording of the second RSP Christmas Special (you can hear me make a fool of myself at the first one here). During the game, which had a large audience definitely featuring some prominent academics, I was joking with my colleague David that unless he started asking questions on Skyrim (where the latest Elder Scrolls game is set) I wasn’t going to know very much. I had already fluked the question on the books of the Bible and was then stumped by a question on the Unification Church. It was during this aside that I happened to get a glimpse at some of the prominent academics who were listening to our brief exchange. It was then that the idea of ludicrosity returned to me. The looks I saw can only be summed up in one way: “Is this guy serious?” I don’t mean to criticise them for giving me those looks or thinking in that manner. I can completely sympathise with them because on one level if I had been in their position I would probably be thinking the exact same thing.

However, as a theory driven scholar driving home that we should all be phenomenologists I am both blessed and cursed by a generality in the academic market place. I can, in theory, be dropped into any number of locales and teach any number of introductory style courses for the study of religion. But, if the recent adverts for academic positions are anything to go by, no one wants the general theorist, they want specialists in a particular topic (Islam usually[1]). And as “theory and method” no longer seems to appear as a “concrete” specialism I would have to say that I specialise in video games. Yet if those looks were anything to go by then that specialism isn’t going to serve me very well either. We have supposedly proclaimed the death of the World Religions Paradigm, and yet academic post after academic post is advertised for positions framed on that very paradigm. “Don’t think in terms of WRP,” we are told, “but that’s how we’re going organise our departments.” Credible academia seemingly depends on an idea we’ve abandoned.

I do not wish to criticise those who would think that the study of video games in Religious Studies isn’t a credible activity. I understand their scepticism. We’re breaching new territory, charting a region on the social scientific map that we may very easily fall off. William Sims Bainbridge, for example, has already been writing on the topic for some time but his recent work has been descending into an apologetic transhumanism (see this blog post for example) which would incite many of us to use that most dirty of RS swearwords: “Theology!” And certainly the same could be said of treating the religions of video games in themselves if we are not careful. But I have no intention of promoting the Nine Divines as a religion – that is the province of a number of emerging Facebook groups – and I am instead intrigued by the analytic value of such a study. To give another example, another paper from the conference made heavy use of Lyons et. al’s concept of “overimitation” (2007) to explain religious rituals. Using this concept to compare ritual worship in the Nine Divines and other meat-world instances we can see just how problematic the idea of “overimitaiton” is for social science. In fact it is on the very demonstration of this point that credibility depends.

But in saying this two forms of credibility are beginning to emerge. On the one hand there is academic credibility, proving that the study of video games as I have gone about the task is valid social science. On the other hand there is employment credibility, proving that religion and video games is worth a teaching position in a university. And we cannot simply assume that appeasing one side will appease the other. There is a difficult and tentative line to be followed in reaching a sense of “credibility” that can satisfy both sides of the line. On the social scientific map, it seems, credibility can only be found on that part that reads: “Here be dragons”.

References

Smart, N. (1996); Dimensions of the Sacred; London, Harper Collins

Lyons, D. et al. (2007); “The Hidden Structure of Overimitation” in PNAS 104; pg.19751-19756

[1] It was somewhat depressing that one of the catalogues from the publishers present at the conference devoted a full fifteen pages to books on Islam where the nearest rival (Christianity) could only muster four as if all we talk about these days is the one religion.

Approaching contemporary Christian faith in the Western academy

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Our general efforts of bridging the gap between our own socio-cultural parameters in research of other faith traditions no doubt has developed its own tradition and its own ethics of interdisciplinarity. It might then be necessary to reflect on the fact that aside from phenomena such as New Age or so-called sectarian fringe groups in society, it is also important to take stock of the course taken by once dominant and normative traditions, notably the Christian churches. In many ways their practices continue to be pervasive to many formative choices in constructing a symbolic imaginary – be that consciously in affirmation or rejection, subconsciously in modi of repression, or pre-consciously, i.e. without a prior awareness that elements adopted within a socio-cultural or political symbolic have had Christian “religious” origins. This is in part what the Critical Religion project is seeking to address.

The bold declaration of a “post-Christian secular” West, as has been elaborated across various fields and disciplines, has changed the influence and public emphasis ascribed to the institution of the Church (I mean this at a conceptual level, where denominational differences merely amount to a diverging implementation of its institutional character). Heralded almost as a revolutionary struggle to destabilise the institution(s) and its (their) insidious hierarchies, secularisation ushered in an era of research in alternative forms of spirituality (itself a crucial buzz-word), that was to displace the institutional, traditional religiosity of a former age. The phrase “I’m not religious, but…”, to my mind, stems from this particular antagonism between a view of traditional Christianity as naive and ritualistic, and the emergence of a popular, deregulated “spiritual search” which aims to find a relationship to “something sacred” in life, free-from disciplinary boundaries, a peculiar form of religious diet. Our postmodern sensibilities thrive on this kind of absolved freedom that does not need to submit to the regulation of the norm, does not have to answer to the need of the many. “I’m not religious, but…” is an idiom that identifies the wish for spiritual liberation without the risk of material relationship. In other words, each to their own!, even if that means rendering personal spirituality in splendid isolation, both from society and the demands of the public, as well as ultimately from an encounter with oneself as another. ‘I positively feel, in my hideous modern way that I can’t get into touch with my mind’ (as Katherine Mansfield wrote in her Journal (ed John Middleton Murray, NY: McGraw-Hill 1964 repr., p82).  There is no encounter with an o/Other, only a reflection of one’s own urge of spiritual transcendence into nothingness.

What does and what can a critical view on the Christian tradition reveal standing outside of its institutional hierarchy, if not altogether outside its disciplinary conceptions? The history connecting the two institutions, academy and church, is long, and fraught with its own struggles of independence from theology and divinity faculties. The disciplinary differentiation between, for example, theology and (what has become known as) “religious studies”, was seen to follow the trend implicit in the secularisation of the academy that would posit critical rigour and scientific validation of varying research perspectives into competition with each other. The plurality of methods in the field of religious studies amplifies the problematic (and capitalist) ideological assumptions that become apparent when researching questions of institutional power, so tangible in matters ecclesial. Whereas the former is free to identify its self-interest in the hermeneutical horizon that focalises on the church and aspects of Christian living, faith and doctrine, religious studies, in an attempt to question not only the very assumptions of what constitutes any of these elements in interaction with other socio-political and geo-economic concerns, it also has to reflect on its own validatory methods drawn from a range of fields outwith the parameters of classical theology. Thus, its perspectives often drive at a philosophy, psychology, sociology or anthropology in deconstruction of “religion”, instead of organising and constructing frameworks by which to orientate a religious ethics in view of a Christian conception of divinity.

The emphasis I put onto the ethical dimension of disciplinarity here is crucial to the way I rationalise the critical capacity and impact for research into Christian institutional life in the West at present. Ethics, with its emphasis on right relations, on the means of such relationship and the modalities of their interactions offers a sufficient model for conceptualising interdisciplinary inquiry at the level of the text and its metanarrative discourse. Not by chance did discussions on “secular theology” popularised in the works of, for example, John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God, 1963), Paul Tillich (Theology of Culture, 1964) and Dorothee Sölle (Christ the Representative, 1967) tie themselves to a discussion of the ethics of incarnation, establishing theological enquiry at the intersection between anthropology and sociology on the one hand and the political and ideological impact of the institution of doctrine on the other. Whereas philosophy of religion has paved a way for the inquiry into the role of doctrine, and much has been written within and outside of the theological faculty to consider the psychology of worship, I want to suggest that the route to situating the current state of the churches, as institutions and as instituting bodies to the life of participating believers, can be helpfully illuminated by a focus on liturgy, conceptually and practically. In its multidimensional engagement, liturgy can be understood to intersect with every aspect of Christian living, inside and outside strictly ecclesial spaces (Peter Cornehl offers an argument to this effect in Die Welt ist voll von Liturgie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005). To be reading liturgy outside of a strictly theological concern, I suggest, not only allows investigation of crossing points between spiritual concern and physical embodiment, between individual participation and collective identity, and between a faithful repetition and innovative response to tradition, conceptualising liturgy also allows for a critical assessment from outside the institution that it perpetuates, and invigorates. Liturgy is an invitation to shift disciplinary emphases.

Ritual as paradigm – and the making of life

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

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In his recent blog posting Tim Fitzgerald has offered some highly informed and trenchant observations on my attempt to urge caution upon those who might be perceived by a wider public as engaged in the deconstruction of the term ‘religion’ in ways that verge upon the wholesale destruction of entire dimensions of human experience. I am absorbing and digesting Tim’s comments.

In this posting I would, however, like to focus upon ‘ritual’ as a concept that has recently re-emerged as a key topos in many contexts, one notable example of which is the massive German 9.2m Euro ‘Ritual Dynamics’ project at the University of Heidelberg. I wish to focus upon this concept because I experience an affinity between the highly ambitious claims made for ‘ritual’ by the influential anthropologist Roy Rappaport in his ground-breaking book Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and my own experience in the course of a decade of intense fieldwork.

My conscious journey into transformational ritual began in 1999 at a ‘Council of All Beings’ led the rain-forest activist John Seed in the north of Scotland. This consisted in a ritualised three day process involving exceptionally deep, indeed primordial regression that then culminated in the first explicit ‘open-ended’ ritual I had ever taken part in. By ‘open ended’ I mean the enactment of the classic ritual structure of preparation, departure to the limen, return and re-aggregation in which the outcome was not predetermined in the same way that the many Eucharists and Lord’s Suppers I have attended as a Christian are focused upon and structured around the symbolic re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ with a view to the successful programming of the believer.

In the course of the Council of All Beings event I underwent acute disintegration – and then freaked out. In more formal terms I would regard this in Roy Rappaport’s language as an ‘operational’ abreactive rebirth experience that in cognitive terms was experienced and articulated as confrontation by and surrender to the Divine Feminine manifested as Gaia.

The upshot of this experience was the disturbing discovery that I had undergone an inner reversal, a kind of field switch, as though the polarity of my entire being and its energy flows had been reversed. For many years I had climbed the slippery pole of academia as dialectical Barthian theologian holding together by sheer energy and workaholic intensity contradictory tensions between the theological traditions and the versions of modernity I had learned and then taught. I lived in an ocean filled with books, cruising through the world of learning like a wandering basking shark that consumed almost everything of any interest it encountered, both the books – and sometimes people as well. However, I was also, like Calvin – and Carl Gustav Jung’s father – a repressed and driven Freudian, with a hungry and aggressive ego beating down and subordinating libido, and sublimating Eros into the super-ego of what Karl Barth helpfully, if fatefully, calls ‘God the Commander’ (Church Dogmatics, III/4).

With a Protestant identity shattered there was much to learn about ‘getting a life’; this involved growing and expanding the part that had undergone an energy inversion – all the rest has had to be melted down piece by piece through regression and surrender. As reported in a first posting on the Critical Religion web-site, I set out to do this through participant fieldwork in (e.g.) psycho-drama, Celtic spirituality, death-awareness training, trans-organisational shamanism, (neo-)shamanism, fire-walking, dry and wet rebirthing, the initiation practices of the men’s movement, Neo-Tantra, and so on. All such practices present challenges if observation is, as it were, for real and not intellectualised voyeurism – or an entomology directed at human insects. I am fully aware that this does not fit into the strict separation of the emic and etic.

After leaving an archaic role like that of Professor of Divinity at Scotland’s ‘first university’ and taking up a ‘modern’ chair in Religious Studies at Lancaster, I ceased teaching theology completely and developed the research base for a large book on Religion and Social Theory, the material of which I taught at Lancaster, and then recently here in Stirling. A complex conundrum then gradually emerged, part of which became the question I set myself to address at the recent BASR meeting in Durham. As reported in a posting following the BSA Sociology of Religion Group conference in Birmingham at Easter this year, it was apparent that whilst advocates of secularisation and globalisation theory had been engaged in a struggle for subdisciplinary hegemony in the study of religion, it would appear that the proponents of secularisation theory and its variants had won hands down, and the traditionalised life of the sub-discipline had been restored to its normality.

Given this broad context there is a pragmatic question as to how, and to what extent a concept of ritual might be used as an integrative paradigm, a middle rank theory capable of providing a framework for the comprehensive decipherment of the resurgent and highly complex contemporary religio-spiritual field to which Tim Fitzgerald rightly draws attention. This organisation and classification would it seems to me be possible on the basis of developing and then applying the model of ritual that evolves from Arnold Van Gennep through the work of Victor and Edith Turner, and the performance theorist Richard Schechner in, for example, his remarkable essay, ‘The Future of Ritual’ (1993). The basic pattern of preparation, departure, touching the limen, return and re-aggregation can serve as a template in relation to which a myriad processes ranging from small-scale spiritual workshop bricolage to global events such as the ever more elaborate quasi-rituals that attend the openings of the modern Olympic Games or the regular Parliament of the World Religions might be categorised.

There is beyond this pragmatic perspective a far more difficult theoretical question, and this concerns the reception of the claims of a renewed ritual paradigm advanced in magisterial terms by Rappaport in Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity. This is a text that divides opinion between definite enthusiasts and those who regard it as an obscure, even obscurantist book. Why should there be this difficulty?

Rappaport’s work is in my view grounded in a hermeneutical circle created on the basis of affinities between the role of relatively unambiguous ritual processes studied in, for example, such classics as his ground-breaking study of the Tsembaga Maring people in Papua New Guinea, Pigs for the Ancestors (1968/1984), and then theorised in the later Ecology, Meaning and Religion (1979), and the essentially modern and self-consciously grand theory of his posthumous masterpiece to which a global readership ought to relate. My contention is that the latter connection fails: most people in modernity have little or no conscious experience analogous to the primordial rituals of initiation, exchange, adaptation and transformation that form one pole within the ellipse underpinning Rappaport’s hermeneutic.

The terminal problem that has confronted me when attempting to write the kind of book I conceived in the outline of Religion and Social Theory: A Critical Introduction is this: on what assumptions or transcendental basis ought such a work be constructed?  Should an attempt to map the recomposition of the religio-spiritual field between the putative universality of globalisation processes and the infinite variety of the anthropology specific locales and of the body and consciousness assume the marginality of residual ‘religion’, or inspired by Rappaport, be worked out on the basis that ‘ritual is the basic social act’? But would the latter strategy be possible in the actual absence of the experience of the constitutive power of such ritual on the part of the vast majority of a projected readership? How could such a textbook be regarded as more than a dialectical fantasy informed by the tormented experiential trajectory of one individual?

Unwilling, indeed incapable of expending energy on what would be futile efforts to convince those without the first hand experience of the ritual process that there was plausibility informing Rappaport’s complex theoretical contentions, I now take my leave. For the moment the conundrum defeats me, and so I withdraw from the field until such time as a viable solution occurs to me.

I believe that there is a parallel between the phenomena which departments of Religious Studies purport to study and explain and the theories used in such explanation, and a parallel relationship between music and musicology. I now take my own hint – and leave to work at the music in the hope that the theory will eventually interpret that which has given me renewed life on the margins of a societal reality now in bondage to the market, subjected to omniscient surveillance, and dedicated to the manufacture of humankind in an inflated higher education industry.