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“Becoming Recognizable: Postcolonial Independence and the Reification of Religion” – comments on Maria Birnbaum’s thesis

19 Tuesday May 2015

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I just finished reading “Becoming Recognizable: Postcolonial Independence and the Reification of Religion,” an outstanding doctoral thesis by Maria Birnbaum, who recently completed graduate work in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. Birnbaum’s work will be of interest to anyone engaged in analysis and critique of religion as a category of public policy because:

  1. it advances theorizing about how religion becomes constructed in the discourse of international relations about the recognition of states and because
  2. it illustrates why such theorizing matters in the practical functioning of international statecraft.

I expect to cite Birnbaum in my work and will recommend her dissertation to graduate students and colleagues.

Before proceeding any further with a short summary of the thesis and a brief discussion of how it relates to my project, I want to indicate a significant lacuna in what Birnbaum has written: with the exception of works by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, there is very little mention of current critiques of the depiction and use of religion in IR. Most notably, Birnbaum makes no reference to Timothy Fitzgerald’s 2011 benchmark book, Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (Continuum). This is unfortunate since Fitzgerald’s substantial interrogation of themes and authors Birnbaum engages in her text would enrich her own analysis considerably. I hope that she will remedy this omission as she proceeds with publication of her important work.

The thesis is a clear and concisely written argument for practicing what Birnbaum calls “genealogical sensitivity” in international relations theory (IR). She uncovers major flaws in the work of Daniel Philpott, Scott Thomas and Jurgen Habermas – three authorities in IR who argue for the recognition of religion in global politics. Birnbaum shows although religion is assumed to be an “already present and intelligible” phenomenon that is a powerful determinant of identity and agency, none of the three can identify what it is that ought to be recognized. Furthermore, she argues that the process of recognition they support works to create that which it purports to be acknowledging. She claims that, in general, IR theory tends to be unaware of the contingencies of history, economics and power relations that underlie what gets labeled and institutionalized as ‘religion.’ Thus, Philpott, Thomas and Habermas exemplify what Birnbaum sees as forgetfulness and naivete in IR – forgetfulness (her word) about the processes of history that have brought about social groupings and classifications and naivete (my word) about how the very rhetoric of difference and particularity functions to produce the groups that governments aspire to manage.

Birnbaum condenses a great deal of complex theory and analysis in her text. Philosophical and political discussions pertaining to “being and becoming” are summarized and evaluated. She favors an approach that would balance the necessity of stabilizing social and governmental entities – i. e. “being” – with attentiveness to constant change that requires flexibility of boundaries and group definition – i.e. “becoming.” She reviews debates and literature related to the foundation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland and Israel as a Jewish state to show how religion emerged during the twentieth century dissolution of the British Empire as a “taken-for-granted juridical, cultural and political category” that affected the lives and deaths of millions. Her moving conclusion restates her argument that religion ought not to be used as a stand-alone analytic category because such a practice represses and thus disguises what is at issue in the struggles for power and resources that continue to fuel global conflicts.

Presently, I am at work on developing theory about how the category of religion is used strategically in technologies of statecraft to at times support existing orders of authority and at other times to undermine them. I argue that ‘religion’ has emerged rather recently as a placeholder for conquered and marginalized groups that are allowed to exist with some degree of cohesion within the jurisdictions of dominant sovereignties. The dominated group is allowed a circumscribed degree of autonomy as a religion if it agrees to abide by certain limitations chiefly in regard to a renunciation of the forms of violence – i.e. police and military functions – that the ascendant state reserves for itself. Thus, I understand religions to operate as the weakened vestiges of former states within fully functioning states. However, the very fact that religions are accorded some degree of sovereignty within dominant governments gives them a platform on which to strive for increased power and recognition. Religions are always restive to some degree and therefore behave like once and future states. Likewise governments habitually aggrandize religions by invoking theistic traditions as honored predecessors in order to glorify authority wielded in the here and now with a mantle of mystified and ancient grandeur. Examples abound in the preambles of contemporary legal and quasi-legal documents that make vague reference to a divine power as the ultimate justification for the present governing order. Because such theistic antecedents are almost always male, such contrived practices of nostalgia result in the shoring up of patriarchal ruling structures that characterize current governing regimes.

The thrust of the theory I am proposing undermines difference between so-called secular and religious orders of governance. Instead, I posit the existence of two unequal registers of government that eye one another with alternating degrees of competition and collusion, that jockey each other for domains of influence and that make use of one another to maintain and increase power.

I am developing such arguments along with several colleagues in a series of essays, edited collections and a monograph in progress. Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, edited with Trevor Stack and Timothy Fitzgerald, will to appear this year from Brill. My essay in the volume, titled “The Category of Religion in the Technology of Governance: An Argument for Understanding Religions as Vestigial States” is an overview of my position.)

By showing how theorists in international relations articulate ideology that first reifies religions under the guise of recognition and then works to create and solidify contemporary state apparatuses to manage what is imagined as already there, Birnbaum enhances understanding of how ‘religion’ is linked to processes of governmentality. She also documents a sinister side to the whole business by pointing out some of the ways in which reified religions have become carriers of rigid and policed identities that exacerbate inter-group tensions and undermine progressive politics. Her work contributes to a growing and urgently necessary body of theory that is unraveling confusions propagated in the narratives of government in which we are all enmeshed.

NB This blog was first published on the NAASR site, 11.5.15.

Conference Report: Women in Secularism 2

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

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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]

A week with Professor Naomi Goldenberg

27 Friday Apr 2012

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This week the Critical Religion Research Group has hosted Prof. Naomi Goldenberg from the University of Ottawa.

We have organised a staff/postgraduate seminar for her in Stirling, taken her to Aberdeen for a conference organised by Dr Trevor Stack (of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and the Rule of Law) on “Modernity and the Category of Religion” (at which our own Drs Timothy Fitzgerald and Alison Jasper also spoke), and organised a public lecture for her in London. There were also a considerable number of engagements and interactions with colleagues and postgraduate students that took place apart from these public appearances.

There has been considerable interest in her proposal that religions can be thought of as “vestigial states”, and we look forward to her further development of this work. There are various audio items relating to these themes available on our website. This should enable further dissemination of her ideas.

In the meantime, we would like to thank Prof. Goldenberg most heartily for her incredible energy and engagement this week: her readiness to debate so freely and so profoundly with us and so many other people in many different contexts, her graciousness with regard to the punishing schedule we organised for her, and her warm support for our work in the context of the Critical Religion Research Group – as well as her great sense of humour that encouraged and enriched us throughout the week.

We also want to record our sincere thanks to Simon Barrow of Ekklesia, our partner organisation, for his great engagement and support of this week – he has enabled so much to happen for us in relation to Professor Goldenberg’s visit, and we are immeasurably grateful to him. Ekklesia co-sponsored the public lecture in London, and suggested Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church as a venue, who welcomed us warmly and to whom we are also grateful.

There are a number of our postgraduate students who have helped with promotion and publicity, teaching cover and various other tasks: in particular, Sean Frye, Shani Zour and Chloe Erdmann deserve our thanks. Finally, for much “behind the scenes” support and assistance, we are immensely grateful, as ever, to our wonderful secretarial team, and in particular Jane Barber-Fleming, without whom so many things we have sought to do for this week would simply not have happened.

Timothy Fitzgerald, Andrew Hass, Alison Jasper, Michael Marten

Gender and the Vestigial State of Religion

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

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This is a guest posting by Prof. Naomi Goldenberg, introducing some of the themes she will be addressing when she visits the UK in late April 2012.

 

My interest in critical religion originates in my wish to restart the radical feminist work that used to be done in the subfield of “women and religion.”  For years I had been attending academic meetings in which scholars who spoke about the topic saw themselves as representatives of their own traditions or as apologists for traditions that were the subjects of their research.  Far-ranging critiques of sexist ‘religious’ beliefs, policies and practices, such as that of Mary Daly, had fallen out of favor.  In its place was a quieter, more respectful spirit of reform.  ‘Religious’ history was searched and mined for accounts of women who could be seen as clever agents within their traditions, as heroines who made the best of what was at hand, and as creative interpreters who found sustenance and inspiration in the seemingly oppressive texts and rites of their ‘faiths.’  Although the field of women and religion was flourishing in both divinity schools and secular universities, I was losing interest in an enterprise that I thought had abandoned the objective of political critique and embraced what I consider to be an attitude of advocacy for traditional thought and behavior.

I now think that feminist critical analysis in “women and religion” was blunted because the category of religion was not interrogated.  While deconstruction of concepts and politics related to gender and sex continues to foster exciting theory with significant social impact, religion itself remains largely an under-theorized given.  I believe that this tacit reification of  ‘religion’ works both to undermine women’s recent political achievements and to hinder further advancement.

Consider just these two examples: 1. From the U.S.: Citing the right to ‘religious’ freedom, Republican candidate Rick Santorum proposed allowing states to ban women’s access to contraception, a right won by means of court decisions in the late 1950’s.  Similarly, both Santorum and Mitt Romney, the front-runner for the nomination, objected to the new US health care law’s funding of legal abortions on the grounds that it could cause employers’ to compromise their religious beliefs.  Several newly-enacted state laws now restrict women’s access to health care related to reproduction on religious grounds.

And 2. – From Afghanistan: According to reports from the Guardian News Service, in March of this year, the Karzai government issued a statement asserting that women are subordinate to men, should not mix with men in work or education and must always have a male guardian when they travel.  The statement thus suggests that the Afghan constitution that enshrines the equality of men and women is flawed from a religious perspective.  Furthermore, violence against women as long as it is “sharia compliant” appears to be condoned.  Such news supports the opinion of Fawzia Koofi, the brave woman campaigning to be Afghanistan’s first female president, who says that David Cameron and Barack Obama are supporting the Karzai government in talks with people who want to bribe the Taliban by limiting women’s freedom using ‘religious’ justifications.

By proposing that religions be considered vestigial states at least in regard to law and public policy, I hope to suggest one way of countering arguments that restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms for ‘religious’ purposes deserve more respect and attention than if such limits were to be put forward for merely ‘political’ reasons.  Throughout most of history, governmental organizations have been based on masculine hegemony.  According to the argument I am advancing, when governments are displaced they can persist within contemporary states as ‘religions’ that maintain their patriarchal origins and character.  Since women’s challenges to male domination have only met with some success in recent times within fairly contemporary forms of statecraft, if earlier states known as ‘religions’ are allowed too much authority over domains such as ‘the family’ or ‘the home,’ women will be the losers.   The two examples from the US and Afghanistan provide support for this line of theory.

Media representations of ‘religion’ in the Middle East

26 Monday Mar 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

The Archbishop Resigns

19 Monday Mar 2012

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What seems to have crystallised as the key to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ somewhat early resignation from his job as head of the global Anglican Communion is the issue of sexuality. Over the last ten years a great deal of heat and not much light has been generated around this question in Anglican circles. We have seen socially conservative Anglicans continue to realise and idolise the heteropatriarchal symbolism of traditional Christian theology while socially liberal Anglicans, in contrast, stress its prophetic nature at the same time remaining individualistic in their visions of freedom. African clergy sense the force of former colonial relationships at work in criticism of their stance on gay clergy and marriage, while gay Christians feel viciously stripped of their humanity and similarly betrayed. It is no wonder, that his latest attempt to promote the spirit of cooperation and the Gospel through a global covenant having failed, Rowan Williams felt a wish to move on. Reconciliation, in this context, seems an impossible task.

Yet as more than one commentator has noticed, an interesting fact about all this internal Anglican sound and fury is that it has continued to be focussed on essentially ‘domestic’ issues. Though Rowan Williams has certainly spoken out in the last ten years about economic questions and matters of foreign policy he has remained an outsider looking in; one generally well-respected person commenting from a largely personal perspective, rather than the head of the Church militant advising the prime minister on policy and expecting to be heard. Although the Roman Catholic Church is a far bigger affair, much the same can be said both of it and its leadership. As Professor Naomi Goldenberg said in this blog recently, even this limited role as social commentator is always at risk of ‘being delegitimated in relation to the category of religion’. In fact the fate of the Archbishop provides a good illustration of what she writes about vestigial states, caught up as he is in this acrimonious and most unloving dispute over custom and law pertaining to the ‘family’ both as a social institution and in relation to the Church’s own economy or inner arrangements.

To apply Professor Goldenberg’s analysis to this situation, Anglican Christianity, at one time, a fully integrated element of government, is now increasingly cordoned off from day to day influence by the deployment of the discursive category ‘religion’, that is defined in terms of its own insignificance in relation to the ‘secular’ state. Meantime and in some ways as a consequence of this cordoning off, the ideological character of the foregrounded and ‘secular’ state operates increasingly across the Western world by means of its own closed and self-referential system of economic and managerial justifications. Not really open to criticism, the secular state has acquired a normative status. So it is a matter of simple common sense that the Prime minister is not advised by an Archbishop guilty of ‘partisan posturing’ who should be cheered when he defends Christians but sent back to school when he suggests the Church might actually have something to say about social justice.

Applying Professor Goldenberg’s analysis, the Anglican church as a vestigial state will probably continue to be eager to take on ‘whatever social, cultural and/or managerial functions the recognized state cedes to them’. So the wrangling over gay bishops will probably continue. Perhaps it is a good thing that the Christian Churches as a whole do not function non-vestigially in British society any more, and certainly, for Archbishop Williams it must be something of a relief not to wield that kind of power and responsibility. At the same time, it is also important to recognise that just because it calls itself ‘secular’ this in itself does not exempt the British nation state from criticism of its own decidedly ideological stance on matters from the special relationship with the United States and the future of the NHS, to the role of ‘religion’. One has to ask, what is it about Christianity and the Christian Churches that our so-called ‘secular’ government is so keen to hide from sight?