The Hedgehog Review Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture
A F T E R S E C U L A R I Z AT I O N
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The Hedgehog Review Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture
A F T E R S E C U L A R I Z AT I O N
Spring & Summer 2006 / Volume Eight / Numbers One & Two
This issue is co-sponsored by the Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Copyright © 2006 Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture ISSN 1527-9677 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Editor. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Cover image © iStockphoto.com/Gregory Witczka All statements of opinion or fact are the responsibility of the author alone and not of
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Contents INTRODUCTION
After Secularization / 5 E ssa y s
Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective / 7 José Casanova Is Europe an Exceptional Case? / 23 Grace Davie Secularization and the Impotence of Individualized Religion / 35 Steve Bruce Challenging Secularization Theory: The Growth of “New Age” Spiritualities of Life / 46 Paul Heelas In Search of Certainties: The Paradoxes of Religiosity in Societies of High Modernity / 59 Danièle Hervieu-Léger Sellers or Buyers in Religious Markets? The Supply and Demand of Religion / 69 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart French Secularism and the “Islamic Veil Affair” / 93 Talal Asad Secularity without Secularism: The Best Political Position for Contemporary Jews / 107 David Novak American Religion and European Anti-Americanism / 116 Thomas Albert Howard Islam in the West or Western Islam? The Disconnect of Religion and Culture / 127 Olivier Roy Secularization, European Identity, and “The End of the West” / 133 Slavica Jakelić Islam in European Publics: Secularism and Religious Difference / 140 Nilüfer Göle
R eport from the field
Secularization in the Global South: The Case of Ethiopia / 146 Wilson N. Brissett I N T E RV I E W
An Interview with Peter Berger / 152 Charles T. Mathewes REVIEWS
A Review of Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism / 162 Christopher McKnight Nichols A Review of David Martin’s On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory / 167 Emily Raudenbush BIBLIOGRAPHIC REVIEW
Secularization: A Bibliographic Review / 170 Kevin M. Schultz
After Secularization
T
he idea that religion gradually ceases to be the guiding authority in the lives of individuals and in societies as they become more modern has roots in the intellectual and institutional heritage of the Enlightenment. But even in Enlightenment thought, there was never just one understanding of the relationship between the progress of humanity and the future of religion. Only a few prophets of religion’s decline—Karl Marx being the most notable among them—dared to predict that the world of the future would be a world without religion. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, did not speak of, or look forward to, the end of religion as such, but predicted that human enlightenment would be accompanied by a rational form of religious knowledge and experience. The history of the idea of secularization, in other words, has been a complex one and has involved a number of different, nuanced views. While the idea of secularization was not the property of the social sciences alone, the full embrace of a causal relationship between progress and religious decline happened precisely in the social sciences, which took this assertion to its theoretical heights in the form of secularization theory. The traditional version of secularization theory involved a two-fold claim: that modernization is a universal process that has similar features everywhere and that secularization is inseparable from modernization. From its earliest days, this secularization theory was thus inseparable from the sociological conceptualization of modernity. The decline of religion as a disenchantment of the world, Max Weber declared a century ago, was one of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and constitutive of the general processes of modernity. Due to this intimate connection between the notions of secularization and modernity, the crisis of secularization theory occurred not only because of empirical evidence that came in the form of religious revivals around the world, but also because of a problem in its own conceptual foundation. As a result, for almost two decades now, social scientists have been divided into two camps: those who want to discard secularization theory altogether and those who want to preserve some part of it for limited use. Many agree that secularization theory still works (only) in Western Europe. Others suggest that secularization has occurred in the United States as well, not simply as a result of the general processes of modernization—industrialization and urbanization—but as a consequence of the actions of concrete historical agents. On the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Heelas proposes that, due to the rise of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, it is not only secularization but sacralization, too, that characterizes European religious life. Still others, who view secularization as a process of individualization and privatization of religion, read this New Age spirituality as ultimate proof of secularization processes.
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The claims in the secularization debate very much depend on one’s definition of both religion and secularization. Attempting to introduce some conceptual clarity and empirical accuracy into the debate, José Casanova suggests that secularization should be thought of as a three-fold phenomenon—the decline of religion, the differentiation of the secular spheres, and the privatization of religion. He is right, of course, but there are other ways in which secularization could be conceptualized; for example, as a weakening in the authority of the faith that is still embraced or as the re-symbolization of ancient creeds in ways that accommodate the modern world. Each one of these subtheses should be empirically and separately studied in the context of concrete historical cases. Arguably the most important realization that came out of the secularization debate was that the questions of what religion is and what it ought to be are mutually intertwined in our contemporary thinking of religion, just as they were in the times when secularization theory was born. The disentanglement of these two questions is vital if we are to see that what is at stake in the secularization debate is not just the destiny of the social sciences, but, much more importantly, our appreciation of the place of religion in the contemporary world. How are we to understand the different roles that religion plays in different societies and at the same time preserve our ability to conceptualize this as a problem? How should we approach the relationship between modernity and secularity while being aware that there is no single modernity, only multiple modernities? How might we understand secularization in a time and world after secularization? Religion today has not only survived the modern world, but even thrives in some senses. That said, as Peter Berger observed some decades ago, “something still happened.” The old secularization theory may not explain exactly what did happen, but it is pressing that we continue to try to make sense of it all. Given the nature of events unfolding in the world, much is at stake in how we address such questions.
—T.H.R.
essa y s
Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective José Casanova
O
ver a decade ago, I suggested that in order to speak meaningfully of “secularization,” we needed to distinguish between three different connotations:
a) Secularization as the decline of religious beliefs and practices in modern societies, often postulated as a universal, human, developmental process. This is the most recent but by now the most widespread usage of the term in contemporary academic debates on secularization, although it remains unregistered in most dictionaries of most European languages.
b) Secularization as the privatization of religion, often understood both as a general modern historical trend and as a normative condition, indeed as a precondition for modern liberal democratic politics.1 c) Secularization as the differentiation of the secular spheres (state, economy, science), usually understood as “emancipation” from religious institutions and norms. This is the core component of the classic theories of secularization, which is related to the original etymological-historical meaning of the term within medieval Christendom. As indicated by every dictionary of every Western European language, it refers to the
1
My book, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), put into question the empirical as well as the normative validity of the privatization thesis.
José Casanova is Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he has taught since 1987. He has published widely in the areas of sociological theory, religion and politics, transnational migration, and globalization. His most important work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has appeared in multiple languages. He is presently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
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transfer of persons, things, meanings, etc., from ecclesiastical or religious to civil or lay use, possession, or control.2 Maintaining this analytical distinction, I argued, should allow for the examination of the validity of the three propositions independently of each other and thus refocus the often fruitless secularization debate into comparative historical analysis that could account for different patterns of secularization, in all three meanings of the term, across societies and civilizations. Yet the debate between European and American sociologists of religion remains unabated. For the European defenders of the traditional theory, the secularization of Western European societies appears as an empirically irrefutable fait accompli.3 But Europeans tend to switch back and forth between the traditional meaning of secularization and the more recent meaning that points to the progressive, and, since the 1960s, drastic and assumedly irreversible decline of religious beliefs and practices among the European population. European sociologists tend to view the two meanings of the term as intrinsically related because they view the two realities—the decline in the societal power and significance of religious institutions, and the decline of religious beliefs and practices among individuals—as structurally related components of general processes of modernization. American sociologists of religion tend to restrict the use of the term secularization to its narrower, more recent meaning of the decline of religious beliefs and practices among individuals. It is not so much that they question the secularization of society, but simply that they take it for granted as an unremarkable fact. The United States, they assume, was already born as a modern secular society. Yet they see no evidence of a progressive decline in the religious beliefs and practices of the American people. If anything, the historical evidence points in the opposite direction of progressive churching of the American population since independence.4 Consequently, many American sociologists of religion tend to discard the theory of secularization, or at least its postulate of the progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices, as a European myth, once they are able to show that in the United States none of the usual “indicators” of secularization, such as church attendance, frequency of prayer, belief in God, etc., evince any longterm declining trend.5
2
“Secularization,” The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Elsevier, 2001) 13,786–91.
3
Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
4
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Andrew M. Greeley, Religious Change in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
5
Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 60.3 (1999): 249–73; Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
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The new American paradigm has turned the European model of secularization on its head.6 In the extreme “supply-side” version of the rational choice theory of religious markets, American sociologists use the American evidence to postulate a general structural relationship between disestablishment or state deregulation, open and free competitive and pluralistic religious markets, and high levels of individual religiosity. What was until now the American exception attains normative status, while the previous European rule is now demoted to being a deviation from the American norm. The low levels of religiosity in Europe are now supposedly explained by the persistence of either the religious establishment or highly regulated monopolistic or oligopolistic religious markets.7 But the internal comparative evidence within Europe does not support the basic tenets of the American theory. Monopolistic situations in Poland and Ireland are linked to persistently high levels of religiosity, while increasing liberalization and state deregulation elsewhere are often accompanied by persistent rates of religious decline.8 An impasse has been reached in the debate. The traditional An impasse has been reached theory of secularization works relatively well for Europe, but in the debate. not for the United States. The American paradigm works relatively well for the U.S., but not for Europe. Neither can offer a plausible account of the internal variations within Europe. Most importantly, neither works very well for other world religions and other parts of the world. Thus, in order to overcome the impasse and surmount the fruitless debate, one needs to make clear the terminological and theoretical disagreements. But most importantly, one needs to historicize and contextualize all categories, refocus the attention beyond Europe and North America, and adopt a more global perspective.9 While the decline and privatization sub-theses have undergone numerous critiques and revisions in the last fifteen years, the understanding of secularization as a single process of functional differentiation of the various institutional spheres or sub-systems of modern societies remains relatively uncontested in the social sciences, particularly within European sociology. Yet one should ask whether it is appropriate to subsume the multiple and diverse historical patterns of differentiation and fusion of the various
6
R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98.5 (1993): 1,044–93.
7
Theodore Caplow, “Contrasting Trends in European and American Religion,” Sociological Analysis 46.2 (1985): 101–8; Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone, “A Supply-Side Interpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (1994): 230–52; Roger Finke, “The Consequences of Religious Competition: Supply-Side Explanations for Religious Change,” Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment, ed. L. A. Young (New York: Routledge, 1997) 45–65.
8
Steve Bruce, “The Supply-Side Model of Religion: The Nordic and Baltic States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39.1 (2000): 32–46.
9
José Casanova, “Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective,” Predicting Religion, ed. Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 17–29.
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institutional spheres (that is, church and state, state and economy, economy and science) that one finds throughout the history of modern Western societies into a single teleological process of modern functional differentiation. One should further ask the extent to which it is possible to dissociate the analytical reconstructions of the historical processes of differentiation of Western European societies from general theories of modernity that postulate secular differentiation as a normative project or global requirement for all “modern” societies. In other words, can the theory of secularization as a particular theory of European historical developments be dissociated from general theories of global modernization? Can there be a non-Western, non-secular modernity or are the self-definitions of modernity inevitably tautological insofar as secular differentiation is precisely what defines a society as “modern”? I fully agree with Talal Asad that the secular “should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually secular are inextricably emancipates itself from the controlling power of ‘religion’ and thus achieves the latter’s relocation.”10 In the historibound together and mutually cal processes of European secularization, the religious and condition each other. the secular are inextricably bound together and mutually condition each other. Asad has shown how “the historical process of secularization effects a remarkable ideological inversion…. For at one time ‘the secular’ was a part of a theological discourse [saeculum],” while later “the religious” is constituted by secular political and scientific discourses, so that “religion” itself as a historical category and as a universal globalized concept emerges as a construction of Western secular modernity.11
…the religious and the
But Asad’s own genealogy of the secular is too indebted to the self-genealogies of secularism he has so aptly exposed, and fails to recognize the extent to which the formation of the secular is itself inextricably linked with the internal transformations of European Christianity, from the so-called Papal Revolution to the Protestant Reformation, and from the ascetic and pietistic sects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the emergence of evangelical, denominational Protestantism in nineteenth-century America. Should one define these transformations as a process of internal secularization of Western Christianity, or as the cunning of secular reason, or both? A proper rethinking of secularization will require a critical examination of the diverse patterns of differentiation and fusion of the religious and the secular and their mutual constitution across all world religions.
10 Talal
Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christiantiy, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 191.
11 Asad
192; see also Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
10
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The contextualization of categories should begin with the recognition of the particular Christian historicity of Western European developments, as well as of the multiple and diverse historical patterns of secularization and differentiation within European and Western societies. Such a recognition in turn should allow a less Euro-centric comparative analysis of patterns of differentiation and secularization in other civilizations and world religions, and more importantly the further recognition that with the world-historical process of globalization initiated by the European colonial expansion, all these processes everywhere are dynamically interrelated and mutually constituted.
Multiple Differentiations, Secularizations, and Modernities There are multiple and diverse secularizations in the West and multiple and diverse Western modernities, and they are still mostly associated with fundamental historical differences between Catholic, Protestant, and Byzantine Christianity, and between Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism. As David Martin showed, in the Latin-Catholic cultural area, and to some extent throughout Continental Europe, there was a collision between religion and the differentiated secular spheres—that is, between Catholic Christianity and modern science, modern capitalism, and the modern state.12 As a result of this protracted clash, the Enlightenment critique of religion found here ample resonance; the secularist genealogy of modernity was constructed as a triumphant emancipation of reason, freedom, and worldly pursuits from the constraints of religion; and practically every “progressive” European social movement from the time of the French Revolution to the present was informed by secularism. The secularist self-narratives, which have informed functionalist theories of differentiation and secularization, have envisioned this process as the emancipation and expansion of the secular spheres at the expense of a much diminished and confined, though also newly differentiated, religious sphere. The boundaries are well kept; only they are relocated, drastically pushing religion into the margins and into the private sphere. In the Anglo-Protestant cultural area, by contrast, and particularly in the United States, there was “collusion” between religion and the secular differentiated spheres. There is little historical evidence of any tension between American Protestantism and capitalism and very little manifest tension between science and religion in the U.S. prior to the Darwinian crisis at the end of the nineteenth century. The American Enlightenment had hardly any anti-religious component. Even “the separation of church and state” that was constitutionally codified in the dual clause of the First Amendment, had as much the purpose of protecting “the free exercise” of religion from state interference as that of protecting the federal state from any religious entanglement. It is rare, at least until very recently, to find any “progressive” social movement in America appealing to
12 David
Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
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“secularist” values; appeals to the Gospel and to “Christian” values are certainly much more common throughout the history of American social movements, as well as in the discourse of American presidents. The purpose of this comparison is not to reiterate the well-known fact that American society is more “religious” and therefore less “secular” than European societies. While the first may be true, the second proposition does not follow. On the contrary, the United States has always been the paradigmatic form of a modern secular, differentiated society. Yet the triumph of “the secular” came aided by religion rather than at its expense, and the boundaries themselves became so diffused that, at least by European ecclesiastical standards, it is not clear where the secular ends and religion begins. As Tocqueville observed, “not only do the Americans practice their religion out of selfinterest, but they often even place in this world the interest which they have in practicing it.”13 Yet it would be ludicrous to argue that the United States is a less functionally differentiated society, and therefore less modern, and therefore less secular, than France or Sweden. On the contrary, one could argue that there is less functional differentiation of state, economy, science, etc., in étâtiste France than in the United States, but this does not make France either less modern or less secular than the United States. When American sociologists of religion retort from their provincial perspective that secularization is a European myth, they are right if only in the sense that the United States was born as a modern secular state, never knew the established church of the European caesaro-papist absolutist state, and did not need to go through a European process of secular differentiation in order to become a modern secular society. If the European concept of secularization is not a particularly relevant category for the “Christian” United States, much less may it be directly applicable to other axial civilizations with very different modes of structuration of the religious and the secular. As an analytical conceptualization of a historical process, secularization is a category that makes sense within the context of the particular internal and external dynamics of the transformation of Western European Christianity from the Middle Ages to the present. But the category becomes problematic once it is generalized as a universal process of societal development and once it is transferred to other world religions and other civilizational areas with very different dynamics of structuration of the relations and tensions between religion and world, or between cosmological transcendence and worldly immanence. The category of secularization could hardly be applicable, for instance, to such “religions” as Confucianism or Taoism, insofar as they are not characterized by high tension with “the world,” insofar as their model of transcendence can hardly be called “religious,” and insofar as they have no ecclesiastical organization. In a sense, those religions that have always been “worldly” and “lay” do not need to undergo a process of secular-
13 Alexis
12
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) 284.
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ization. To secularize—that is, “to make worldly” or “to transfer from ecclesiastical to civil use”—is a process that does not make much sense in such a civilizational context. In this respect, China and the Confucian civilizational area have been “secular” avant la lettre. It is the postulated intrinsic correlation between modernization and secularization that is highly problematic. There can be modern societies like the U.S., which are secular while deeply religious, and there can be pre-modern societies like China, which from our Euro-centric religious perspective look deeply secular and irreligious.14 It just happened that the particular, specifically Christian, Western European dynamic of secularization became globalized with the expansion of European colonialism, and with the ensuing global expansion of capitalism, of the European system of states, of modern science, and of modern ideologies of secularism. Thus, the relevant questions become how Confucianism, Taoism, and other world religions respond to the global expansion of “Western secular modernity,” and how all the religious traditions are reinterpreted as a response to this global challenge. The concept of multiple modernities, first developed by S. N. Eisenstadt, is a more adequate conceptualization and pragmatic vision of modern global trends than either secular cosmopolitanism or the clash of civilizations. In a certain sense, it shares elements from both. Like cosmopolitanism, the concept of multiple modernities maintains that there are some common elements or traits shared by all “modern” societies that help to distinguish them from their “traditional” or pre-modern forms. But these modern traits or principles attain multiple forms and diverse institutionalizations. Moreover, many of these institutionalizations are continuous or congruent with the traditional historical civilizations. Thus, there is both a civilization of modernity and the continuous transformation of the pre-modern historical civilizations under modern conditions, which help to shape the multiple modernities. Most of the modern traits may have emerged first in the West, but even there one finds multiple modernities. Naturally, this multiplicity becomes even more pronounced as non-Western societies and civilizations acquire and institutionalize those modern traits. Modern traits, moreover, are not developed necessarily in contradistinction to or even at the expense of tradition, but rather through the transformation and the pragmatic adjustment of tradition. In this respect, the multiple modernities position shares with the clash of civilizations position the emphasis on the relevance of cultural traditions and world religions for the formation of multiple modernities.
14 Indeed,
in the same way as the U.S. appears as an “outlier” or deviant case among advanced post-industrial societies, similarly China appears as an outlier among agrarian societies. Actually, China evinces the lowest level of religious beliefs and religious participation of any country in the world, challenging the assumed correlation between insecurity/survival values and religious beliefs and participation. On the Norris/Inglehart scale, agrarian China—at least its Confucian elites—would have appeared for centuries as a highly secular-rational society. See Figures 10.1 and 10.2 in Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 224–6.
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Secular cosmopolitanism is still based on a rigid dichotomous contraposition of sacred tradition and secular modernity, assuming that the more of one, the less of the other. The clash of civilizations perspective, by contrast, emphasizes the essential continuity between tradition and modernity. Western modernity is assumed to be continuous with the Western tradition. As other civilizations modernize, becoming ever more like the West, they will also maintain an essential continuity with their respective traditions— thus, the inevitable clash of civilizations as all modern societies basically continue their diverse and mostly incommensurable traditions. The multiple modernities position rejects both the notion of a modern radical break with traditions as well as the notion of an essential modern continuity with tradition. All traditions and civilizations are radically transformed in the processes of modernization, but they also have the possibility of shaping in particular ways the institutionalization of modern traits. Traditions are forced to respond and adjust to modern conditions, but in the process of reformulating their traditions for modern contexts, they also help to shape the particular forms of modernity.
Decline, Revival, or Transformation of Religion? The progressive decline of institutional Christian religion in Europe is an undeniable social fact. Since the 1960s an increasing majority of the European population has ceased participating in traditional religious practice on a regular basis, while still maintaining relatively high levels of private individual religious beliefs. Grace Davie has characterized this general European situation as “believing without belonging.”15 At the same time, however, large numbers of Europeans, even in the most secular countries, still identify themselves as “Christian,” pointing to an implicit, diffused, and submerged Christian cultural identity. Danièle Hervieu-Léger has offered the reverse characterization of the European situation as “belonging without believing.”16 From France to Sweden and from England to Scotland, the historical churches (Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, or Calvinist), although emptied of active membership, still function, vicariously as it were, as public carriers of the national religion. In this respect, “secular” and “Christian” cultural identities are intertwined in complex and rarely verbalized modes among most Europeans. Yet traditional explanations of European secularization by reference to either increasing institutional differentiation, increasing rationality, or increasing individualism are not persuasive since other modern societies, like the United States, do not manifest similar levels of religious decline. Once the exceptional character of European religious developments is 15 Grace
Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
16 Danièle
Hervieu-Léger, “Religion und Sozialer Zusammenhalt in Europa,” Transit: Europäische Revue 26 (Summer 2004): 101–19.
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recognized, it becomes necessary to search for an explanation not in general processes of modernization but rather in particular European historical developments. Indeed, the most interesting issue sociologically is not the fact of progressive religious decline among the European population since the 1950s, but the fact that this decline is interpreted through the lenses of the secularization paradigm and is therefore accompanied by a “secularist” self-understanding that interprets the decline as “normal” and “progressive”—that is, as a quasi-normative consequence of being a “modern” and “enlightened” European. The secularization of Western European societies can be explained better in terms of the triumph of the knowledge regime of secularism, than in terms of structural processes of socio-economic development. The internal variations within Europe, moreover, can be explained better in terms of historical patterns of church-state and church-nation relations, as well as in terms of different paths of secularization It is the tendency to link among the different branches of Christianity, than in terms of processes of secularization to levels of modernization.
processes of modernization…
It is the tendency to link processes of secularization to that is at the root of our processes of modernization, rather than to the patterns of fusion and dissolution of religious, political, and societal impasse at the secularization communities—that is, of churches, states, and nations— debate. that is at the root of our impasse at the secularization debate. Following Weber we should distinguish analytically the community cult and salvation religious communities.17 Not every salvation religion functions as a community cult—that is, is co-extensive with a territorial political community or plays the Durkheimian function of societal integration. One may think of the many denominations, sects, or cults in America that function primarily as religions of individual salvation. Nor does every community cult function as a religion of individual salvation offering the individual qua individual salvation from sickness, poverty, and all sorts of distress and danger—one may think of state Confucianism in China, Shintoism in Japan, or most caesaro-papist imperial cults. Lesser forms of “folk” religion tend to supply individual healing and salvation. The Christian church and the Muslim umma are two particular though very different forms of historical fusion of community cults and religions of individual salvation. The truly puzzling question in Europe, and the explanatory key in accounting for the exceptional character of European secularization, is why national churches, once they ceded to the secular nation-state their traditional historical function as community cults—that is, as collective representations of the imagined national communities and carriers of the collective memory—also lost in the process their ability to function as religions of individual salvation. Crucial is the question of why individuals in Europe, once they lose faith in their national churches, do not bother to look for alternative
17 Max
Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religion,” From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) 272.
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salvation religions. In a certain sense, the answer lies in the fact that Europeans continue to be implicit members of their national churches, even after explicitly abandoning them. The national churches remain there as a public good to which they have rightful access when it comes time to celebrate the transcendent rites of passage, birth, and death. It is this peculiar situation that explains the lack of demand and the absence of a truly competitive religious market in Europe. In contrast, the particular pattern of separation of church and state codified in the dual clause of the First Amendment served to structure the unique pattern of American religious pluralism. The United States never had a national church. Eventually, all religions in America, churches as well as sects, irrespective of their origins, doctrinal claims, and ecclesiastical identities, turned into “denominations,” formally equal under the constitution and competing in a relatively free, pluralistic, and voluntaristic religious market. As the organizational form and principle of such a religious system, denominationalism constitutes the great American religious invention.18 Along with, yet differentiated from, each and all denominations, the American civil religion functions as the community cult of the nation. At first, the diversity and substantial equality was only institutionalized as internal denominational religious pluralism within American Protestantism. America was defined as a “Christian” nation and “Christian” meant solely “Protestant.” But eventually, after prolonged outbursts of Protestant nativism directed primarily at Catholic immigrants, the pattern allowed for the incorporation of religious others, Catholics and Jews, into the system of American religious pluralism. A process of dual accommodation took place whereby Catholicism and Judaism became American religions, while American religion and the nation were equally transformed in the process. America became a “Judeo-Christian” nation, and Protestant, Catholic, and Jew became the three denominations of the American civil religion. The fact that religion, religious institutions, and religious identities played a central role in the process of incorporating European immigrants has been amply documented and forms the core of Will Herberg’s well-known thesis.19 Herberg’s claim that immigrants became more religious as they became more American has been restated by most contemporary studies of immigrant religions in America.20 It is important to realize, therefore, that immigrant religiosity is not simply a traditional residue, an Old World
18 Sydney
E. Mead, “Denominationalism: The Shape of Protestantism in America,” The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Andrew M. Greeley, The Denominational Society: A Sociological Approach to Religion in America (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1972).
19 Will 20 See
Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960).
José Casanova, “Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A EU/US Comparison,” The New Religious Pluralism and Democracy, ed. Thomas Banchoff (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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survival likely to disappear with adaptation to the new context, but rather an adaptive response to the New World. The thesis implies not only that immigrants tend to be religious because of a certain social pressure to conform to American religious norms, something that is undoubtedly the case, but more importantly, that collective religious identities have always been one of the primary ways of structuring internal societal pluralism in American history.21 In my view, the thesis also offers a more plausible explanation of American religious vitality than rational choice supply-side theories of competitive religious markets. There is a sense in which both European secular developWhen it comes to religion, ments and American religious developments are rather unique there is no global rule. and exceptional. In this respect, one could certainly talk, as Europeans have done for decades, of “American exceptionalism,” or one could talk, as it has become fashionable today, of “European exceptionalism.” But both characterizations are highly problematic, if it is implied, as it was in the past, that America was the exception to the European rule of secularization, or if it is implied, as it often is today, that secular Europe is the exception to some global trend of religious revival.22 When it comes to religion, there is no global rule. All world religions are being transformed radically today, as they were throughout the era of European colonial expansion, by processes of modernization and globalization. But they are being transformed in diverse and manifold ways. All world religions are forced to respond to the global expansion of modernity as well as to their mutual and reciprocal challenges, as they all undergo multiple processes of aggiornamento and come to compete with one another in the emerging global system of religions. Under conditions of globalization, world religions do not only draw upon their own traditions but also increasingly upon one another. Inter-civilizational encounters, cultural imitations and borrowings, diasporic diffusions, hybridity, creolization, and transcultural hyphenations are all part and parcel of the global present. Sociologists of religion should be less obsessed with the decline of religion and more attuned to the new forms that religion is assuming in all world religions at three different levels of analysis: the individual level, the group level, and the societal level. In a certain sense, Ernst Troeltsch’s three types of religion—“individual mysticism,” “sect,” and “church”—correspond to these three levels of analysis.23 At the individual level the
21 Racialization
has been the other primary way of structuring internal societal pluralism in American history. Not religion alone, as Herberg’s study would seem to imply, and not race alone, as contemporary immigration studies would seem to imply, but religion and race and their complex entanglements have served to structure the American experience of immigrant incorporation—indeed, they are the keys to “American exceptionalism.”
22 Grace
Davie, “Europe: The Exception that Proves the Rule?” The Desecularization of the World, ed. Peter Berger (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999).
23 Ernst Troeltsch,
The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (New York: MacMillan, 1931).
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predictions of Troeltsch and William James at the beginning of the last century concerning individual mysticism have held well.24 What Thomas Luckmann called “invisible religion” in the 1960s remains the dominant form of individual religion and is likely to gain increasing global prominence.25 The modern individual is condemned to pick and choose from a wide arrangement of meaning systems. From a Western monotheistic perspective, such a condition of polytheistic and polyformic individual freedom may seem a highly novel or postmodern one. But from a non-Western perspective, particularly that of the Asian pan“Invisible religion”…remains theist religious traditions, the condition looks much more the dominant form like the old state of affairs. Individual mysticism has always been an important option, at least for elites and religious of individual religion…. virtuosi, within the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions. What Inglehart calls the expansion of post-materialist spiritual values can be understood in this respect as the generalization and democratization of options until now only available to elites and religious virtuosi in most religious traditions. As the privileged material conditions available to the elites for millennia are generalized to entire populations, so are the spiritual and religious options that were usually reserved for them. I would not characterize such a process, however, as religious decline. But what is certainly new in our global age is the simultaneous presence and availability of all world religions and all cultural systems, from the most “primitive” to the most “modern,” often detached from their temporal and spatial contexts, ready for flexible or fundamentalist individual appropriation. At the level of religious communities, much of sociology has lamented the loss of Gemeinschaft as one of the negative consequences of modernity. Both individualism and societalization are supposed to expand at the expense of community. Theories of modernization are predicated on the simple dichotomies of tradition and modernity, and of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Most theories of secularization are based on the same simple dichotomies and ultimately on the premise that in the long run processes of modern societal rationalization make community inviable. But the fact is that modernity, as Tocqueville saw clearly, offers new and expanded possibilities for the construction of communities of all kinds as voluntary associations, and particularly for the construction of new religious communities as voluntary congregations. The sect is, of course, the paradigmatic type of a voluntary religious congregation. But in the traditional theory, the sect lives in a high and ultimately unsustainable tension with the larger society. American denominationalism, by contrast, can be understood as the generalization and relaxation of the sectarian principle of voluntary religious association.
24 William
James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
25 Thomas
Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
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Most of the so-called “cults,” “new religions,” or “new religious movements” assume the form of voluntary congregations, but so do the most dynamic forms of Christianity, like the Christian base communities in Latin America or the Pentecostal churches throughout the world, or the most dynamic forms of Islam—such as Tablighi Jamaat, a form of evangelical Islam akin to early nineteenth-century American Methodism—and the many forms of Sufi brotherhoods. Even world religions, like Hinduism or Buddhism, that have a less developed tradition of congregationalism, are emerging as prominent new institutional forms, particularly in the immigrant diasporas. This institutional transformation in the immigrant diasporas is in turn affecting profoundly the religious institutional forms in the civilizational home areas. At the societal level of what could be called “imagined religious communities,” secular nationalism and national “civil religions” will continue to be prominent carriers of collective identities, but ongoing processes of globalization are likely to enhance the reemergence of the great “world religions” as globalized transnational imagined religious communities. While new cosmopolitan and transnational imagined communities will emerge, the most relevant ones are likely to be once again the old civilizations and world religions. Therein lies the merit of Samuel Huntington’s thesis.26 But his geo-political conception of civilizations as territorial units akin to nation-states and superpowers is problematic, leading him to anticipate future global conflicts along civilizational fault lines. In fact, globalization represents not only a great opportunity for the old world religions insofar as they can free themselves from the territorial constraints of the nation-state and regain their transnational dimensions, but also a great threat insofar as globalization entails the de-territorialization of all cultural systems and threatens to dissolve the essential bonds between histories, peoples, and territories that have defined all civilizations and world religions.
Religious Privatization, Religious De-Privatization, or Both? It is unlikely that either modern authoritarian regimes or modern liberal democratic systems will prove ultimately successful in banishing religion to the private sphere. Authoritarian regimes may be temporarily successful through repressive measures in enforcing the privatization of religion. Democratic regimes, by contrast, are likely to have greater difficulty in doing so, other than through the tyranny of a secular majority over religious minorities. As the case of France shows, laïcité can indeed become a constitutionally sacralized principle, consensually shared by the overwhelming majority of citizens, who support the enforcement of legislation banishing “ostensible religious symbols” from the public sphere because they are viewed as a threat to the national system or the national tradition. Obviously, the opposite is the case in the United
26 Samuel
P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
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States, where secular minorities may feel threatened by Judeo-Christian definitions of the national republic. I cannot find a compelling reason, on either democratic or liberal grounds, to banish in principle religion from the public democratic sphere. One could at most, on pragmatic historical grounds, defend the need for separation between “church” and “state,” although I am no longer convinced that complete separation is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for democracy. The attempt to establish a wall of separation between “religion” and “politics” is both unjustified and probably counterproductive for democracy itself. Curtailing the “free exercise of religion” per se must lead to curtailing the free exercise of the civil and political rights of religious citizens and will ultimately infringe on the vitality of a democratic civil society. Particular religious discourses or particular religious practices may be objectionable and susceptible to legal prohibition on some democratic or liberal ground, but not because they are “religious” per se. Tocqueville was perhaps the only modern social theorist who was able to elaborate these issues with relative clarity and freed from secularist prejudices. He questioned the two central premises of the Enlightenment critique of religion, namely that the advancement of education and reason and the advancement of democratic freedoms would make religion politically irrelevant. He anticipated, rather presciently, that the democratization of politics Curtailing the “free exercise of and the entrance of ordinary people into the political arena would augment, rather than diminish, the pubreligion” per se must lead to lic relevance of religion. He found empirical confirmacurtailing the free exercise of tion in the democratic experience of the United States, the civil and political rights at the time the most democratic of modern societies and the one with the highest levels of literacy.27
of religious citizens and will
ultimately infringe on the vitality
The history of democratic politics throughout the world has confirmed Tocqueville’s assumptions. of a democratic civil society. Religious issues, religious resources, interdenominational conflicts, and secular-religious cleavages have all been relatively central to electoral democratic politics and to the politics of civil society throughout the history of democracy. Even in secular Europe, where a majority of the political elites and of ordinary citizens had taken the thesis of privatization for granted, unexpectedly, contentious religious issues have returned again to the center of European politics.28 It is not surprising therefore that this should be even more the
27 The fact that Tocqueville uses the subterfuge of discussing the problems of black slavery and the genocide
of the Native American in a separate chapter at the end of Book I because “they are outside democracy” shows the extent to which Tocqueville was at least implicitly aware that America was a “racial” democracy, for whites only, and therefore far from being a model democracy.
28 José Casanova, “Religion, Secular Identities, and European Integration,” Religion in an Expanding Europe,
ed. Timothy Byrnes and Peter Katzenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
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case in the United States, where historically religion has always been at the very center of all great political conflicts and movements of social reform. From independence to abolition, from nativism to women’s suffrage, from prohibition to the civil rights movement, religion has always been at the center of these conflicts, but also on both sides of the political barricades. What is new in the last decades is the fact that for the first time in American political history, the contemporary culture wars are beginning to resemble the secular-religious cleavages that were endemic to continental European politics in the past. Religion itself has now become a contentious public issue. If today I had to revise anything from my earlier work, it The rules for protection would be my attempt to restrict, on what I thought were from the tyranny of religious justifiable normative grounds, public religion to the public sphere of civil society. This remains my own personal majorities should be the same normative and political preference, but I am not certain democratic rules used to that the secular separation of religion from political society or even from the state are universalizable maxims, defend from the tyranny of any in the sense that they are either necessary or sufficient democratic majority. conditions for democratic politics. As the example of so many modern secular authoritarian and totalitarian states show, from the Soviet Union to secular Turkey, strict no establishment is by no means a sufficient condition for democracy. On the other hand, several countries with at least nominal establishment, such as England or Lutheran Scandinavian countries, have a relatively commendable record of democratic freedoms and of protection of the rights of minorities, including religious ones. It would seem, therefore, that strict separation is also not a necessary condition for democracy. Indeed one could advance the proposition that of the two clauses of the First Amendment, “free exercise” is the one that stands out as a normative democratic principle in itself, while the no-establishment principle is defensible only insofar as it might be a necessary means to free exercise and to equal rights. In other words, secularist principles per se may be defensible on some other ground, but not as intrinsically liberal democratic ones. The rules for protection from the tyranny of religious majorities should be the same democratic rules used to defend from the tyranny of any democratic majority. The protection of the rights of any minority, religious or secular, and equal universal access should be central normative principles of any liberal democratic system. In principle one should not need any additional particular secularist principle or legislation. But as a matter of fact, historically and pragmatically, it may be necessary to disestablish “churches”—that is, ecclesiastical institutions that claim either monopolistic rights over a territory or particular privileges, or it may be necessary to use constitutional and at times extraordinary means to disempower entrenched tyrannical majorities.
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Finally, on empirical grounds there are good reasons why we should expect religion and morality to remain and even to become ever more contentious public issues in democratic politics. Given such trends as increasing globalization, transnational migrations, increasing multiculturalism, the biogenetic revolution, and the persistence of blatant gender discrimination, the number of contentious public religious issues is likely to grow rather than diminish. The result is a continuous expansion of the res publica while the citizen’s republic becomes ever more diverse and fragmented. The penetration of all spheres of life, including the most private, by public policy; the expansion of scientific-technological frontiers giving humanity Demiurgic powers of self-creation and self-destruction; the compression of the whole world into one single common home for all of humanity; and the moral pluralism that seems inherent to multiculturalism—all these transcendent issues will continue to engage religion and provoke religious responses.
22
Is Europe an Exceptional Case? Grace Davie
A
number of factors must be taken into account if we are to understand the place of religion in twenty-first-century Europe.1 These include the legacies of the past, more particularly the role of the historic churches in shaping European culture; an awareness that these churches still have a place at particular moments in the lives of modern Europeans, even though they are no longer able to discipline the beliefs and behavior of the great majority of the population; an observable change in the churchgoing constituencies of the continent, which operate increasingly on a model of choice, rather than a model of obligation or duty; and the arrival in Europe of groups of people from many different parts of the world, notably the global South, with very different religious aspirations from those seen in the host societies. Each of these factors will be taken in turn in order to answer the question set out in the title: is Europe an exceptional case in terms of its patterns of religious life? The answer leads in turn to more questions. If we conclude that Europe is indeed “exceptional,” why is this so? Or, conversely, why not? And what can we say about the future? Will Europe continue within the trajectory set by its past or will it become more like the patterns found elsewhere? Or—it must be asked—will the rest of the world become more like Europe?
1
Overviews of the place of religion in European societies can be found in Gerhard Robbers, ed., State and Church in the European Union (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996); René Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Andrew M. Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (London: Transaction, 2003); John Madeley and Zsolt Enyedi, eds., Church and State in Contemporary Europe: The Chimera of Neutrality (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and in the publications emerging from the European Values Study, listed on the frequently updated EVS website <www.europeanvalues.nl/ index2/htm>. Alongside these overviews, there is a rapidly growing literature on the presence of Islam in Europe; see Jorgen Nielsen, Muslims in Western Europe (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004) for a useful summary of this material.
Grace Davie has a personal Chair in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Exeter, where she is also the Director of the University’s Centre for European Studies. She is the author of Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994), Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (2000), and Europe: The Exceptional Case (2002). The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Agenda will appear in 2007.
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Cultural Heritage Two points are important in relation to the role of the historic churches in shaping European culture; the Christian tradition is indeed a crucial element in the evolution of Europe, but it is by no means the only one. O’Connell identifies three formative factors or themes in the creation and re-creation of the unity that we call Europe: Judeo-Christian monotheism, Greek rationalism, and Roman organization.2 These factors shift and evolve over time, but their combinations can be seen in forming and reforming a way of life that we have come to recognize as European. The religious strand within such combinations is self-evident. One example will suffice: the Christian tradition has had an irreversible effect on the shaping of time and space in this part of the world. Both week and year, for instance, follow the Christian cycle, even if the major festivals are beginning to lose their resonance for large sections of the population. Or to put the same point in a different way, we have had heated debates in parts of Europe about whether or not to shop on Sundays. We do not, for the most part, consider Friday an issue in this respect—though this may change. The same is true of space. Wherever you look in Europe, there is a predominance of Christian churches, some of which retain huge symbolic value. This is not to deny that in some parts of Europe (notably the larger cities) the skyline is becoming an indicator of growing religious diversity. Europe is changing, but the legacies of the past remain deeply embedded in both the physical and cultural environment.
Vicarious Religion Physical and cultural presence is one thing; a “hands-on” role in the everyday lives of European people quite another. Commentators of all kinds agree that the latter is no longer a realistic aspiration for the historic churches of Europe. That does not mean, however, that the churches have entirely lost their significance as markers of religious identity. In my own work, I have explored this continuing ambiguity through the concept of “vicarious religion.”3 By vicarious, I mean the notion of religion performed by an active minority but on behalf of a much larger number, who (implicitly at least) not only understand, but, quite clearly, approve of what the minority is doing. The first half of the definition is relatively straightforward and reflects the everyday meaning of the term—that is, to do something on behalf of someone else (hence the word “vicar”). The second half is more controversial
24
2
James O’Connell, The Making of Modern Europe: Strengths, Constraints and Resolutions, University of Bradford Peace Research Report no. 26 (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1991).
3
Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
and is best explored by means of examples. Religion, it seems, can operate vicariously in a wide variety of ways: churches and church leaders perform ritual on behalf of others; church leaders and churchgoers believe on behalf of others; church leaders and churchgoers embody moral codes on behalf of others; churches, finally, can offer space for the vicarious debate of unresolved issues in modern societies. Each of these propositions will be taken in turn in order to demonstrate the fruitfulness of looking at European religion from this point of view. The least controversial of the above list concerns the role of both churches and church leaders in conducting ritual on behalf of a wide variety of individuals and communities at critical points in their lives. The most obvious examples can be found in the continuing requests, even in a moderately secular society, for some sort of religious ritual at the time of a birth, a marriage, and, most of all, a death. In many parts of Europe, though not in all, the demand for the first two of these diminished sharply in the later decades of the twentieth century. The same is not true with respect to churches’ services at the time of a death. It is at this point, if no other, that most Europeans come into direct contact with their churches and would be deeply offended if their requests for a funeral were met with a rejection. A refusal to offer either a funeral liturgy or appropriate pastoral care would violate deeply held assumptions. Exactly the same point can be made the other way round. It is perfectly possible to have a secular ceremony at the time of a death; de facto, however, relatively few people do this. Much more common is what might be termed a “mixed economy” funeral—that is, a liturgy in which the religious professional is present and the Christian structure maintained but filled with a variety of extraneous elements, including secular music or readings and, with increasing frequency, a eulogy rather than a homily. Princess Diana’s funeral in September 1997 offers an excellent example. Churches, moreover, maintain vicariously the rituals from which a larger population can draw when the occasion demands it, and whilst that population anticipates a certain freedom in ritual expression, they also expect the institutional structures to be kept firmly in place. But churches and church leaders do more than conduct ritual: they also believe on behalf of others. And the more senior or visible the role of the church leader, the more important it becomes that this is done properly. English bishops, to give but one example, are rebuked (not least by the tabloid press) if they doubt in public; it is, after all, their “job” to believe. The most celebrated, and not entirely justified, case of a “doubting bishop” in the Church of England was that of David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham from 1984 to 1994.4 To a large extent the controversy turned on a frequently
4
Shortly after David Jenkins’ consecration in York Minster, the building was struck by lightning, an event that was seen by some as a sign of divine displeasure. This episode was given extensive press coverage at the time (July 1984). See also David Jenkins’ own account in The Calling of a Cuckoo (London: Continuum, 2002).
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misquoted statement concerning the Resurrection. The phrase “not just a conjuring trick with bones” quickly turned into the opposite, for which the Bishop was widely pilloried. The cultural expectation, in other words, is that bishops believe. When they doubt, something quite clearly has gone amiss. Similar pressures emerge with respect to behavioral codes: religious professionals (both local for debate regarding particular, and and national) are expected to uphold certain standards of behavior—not least, more rather often controversial, topics that are than less traditional representations of family difficult to address elsewhere in society? life—and incur criticism when they fail, from outside churches as well as within. It is almost as if people who are not themselves participants in church life want the church’s representatives to embody a certain social and moral order, thereby maintaining a way of living that has long since ceased to be the norm in the population as a whole. Failure leads to accusations of hypocrisy but also to expressions of disappointment (interestingly, royal divorces provoke a similar reaction). Such expectations become at times unreasonable, particularly in relation to the partners and children of religious personnel; it is hardly surprising that clergy families come under strain. The pressures on the Catholic priest are somewhat different, given the requirement of celibacy, but in their own way they are equally demanding.
Could it be that churches offer space
A final possibility with respect to vicariousness develops this point further, and more provocatively. Could it be that churches offer space for debate regarding particular, and often controversial, topics that are difficult to address elsewhere in society? The current debate about homosexuality in the Church of England offers a possible example, an interpretation encouraged by the intense media attention directed at this issue—and not only in Britain. Is this simply an internal debate about senior clergy appointments in which different lobbies within the church are exerting pressure? Or is this one way in which society as a whole comes to terms with profound shifts in the moral climate? If the latter is not true, it is hard to understand why so much attention is being paid to the churches in this respect. If it is true, sociological thinking must take this factor into account. Either way, large sections of the European media are, it seems, wanting to have their cake and eat it too, pointing the spotlight at controversies within the church whilst maintaining that religious institutions must, by their very nature, be marginal to modern society. Social scientific observers of the scene cannot afford to make a similar mistake. The public attention displayed in the examples set out above demands that we understand how religious institutions matter even to those who are not “participants” in them (in the conventional sense of the term). That, moreover, is the norm in European societies—a situation rather different from that found in the United States. Indeed, in a decade of lecturing across both Europe and the U.S., I have seldom met an audience in the former who do not immediately grasp the notion of vicariousness and its implica26
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
tions for the European scene. This is much less the case in the United States, where the connections between the population and their religious organizations are very differently understood. There are exceptions, but to act vicariously is not part of American self-understanding.5 Herein, moreover, lies an important explanation for the “exceptional” nature of Europe’s religion. It derives from a particular history of state-church relationships, out of which grows the notion of a state church (or its successor) as a public utility rather than a private organization. A public utility is available to the population as a whole at the point of need and is funded through the tax system. Precisely that combination remains in place in the Lutheran countries of Europe. Elsewhere both constitutional and financial arrangements have been modified (sometimes radically), but the associated mentalities are, it seems, more difficult to shift.
From Obligation to Consumption The changing nature of churchgoing in modern Europe is important to understand, and to do so, one must clarify the constituency: here are Europe’s diminishing, but still significant churchgoers—those who maintain the tradition on behalf of the people described in the previous section. And here an observable change is taking place: from a culture of obligation or duty to a culture of consumption or choice. What until somewhat recently was simply imposed (with all the negative connotations of this word), or inherited (a rather more positive spin), becomes instead a matter of personal choice: “I go to church (or to another religious organization) because I want to, maybe for a short period or maybe for longer, to fulfill a particular rather than a general need in my life and where I will continue my attachment so long as it provides what I want, but I have no obligation either to attend in the first place or to continue if I don’t want to.” As such, this pattern is entirely compatible with vicariousness: “the churches need to be there in order that I may attend them if I so choose.” The “chemistry,” however, gradually changes, a shift that is discernible in both practice and belief, not to mention the connections between them. There is, for example, an easily documentable change in the patterns of confirmation in the Church of England. The overall number of confirmations has dropped dramatically in the post-war period, evidence once again of institutional decline. In England, though not yet in the Nordic countries, confirmation is no longer a teenage rite of passage, but a relatively rare event undertaken as a matter of personal choice by people of all ages. Indeed, there is a very marked rise in the proportion of adult confirmations among the candidates overall—up to 40 percent by the mid-1990s (by no means enough, however, to offset the fall among teenagers).
5
Grace Davie, “Vicarious Religion: A Methodological Challenge,” Religion in Modern Lives, ed. Nancy Ammerman (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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Confirmation becomes, therefore, a very significant event for those individuals who choose this option, an attitude that is bound to affect the rite itself—which now includes the space for a public declaration of faith. Confirmation becomes an opportunity to make public what has often been an entirely private activity. It is increasingly common, moreover, to baptize an adult Taken together, these events candidate immediately before the confirmation, a gesture indicate a marked change in which is evidence in itself of the fall in infant baptism some twenty to thirty years earlier. Taken together, these events the nature of membership in indicate a marked change in the nature of membership in the historic churches… the historic churches, which become, in some senses, much more like their non-established counterparts. Voluntarism (a market) is beginning to establish itself de facto, regardless of the constitutional position of the churches. Or to continue the “chemical” analogy a little further, a whole set of new reactions are set off that in the longer term (the stress is important) may have a profound effect on the understanding of vicariousness. The trends are considerably more visible in some parts of Europe than in others. There is, for instance, a marked parallel between the Anglicans and the Catholic Church in France in this respect: adult baptisms in the Church of England match very closely those in France—indeed, the similarity in the statistics is almost uncanny, given the very different ecclesiologies embodied in the two churches (one Catholic and one Protestant).6 But it is precisely this shift across very different denominations that encourages the notion that something profound is taking place. Lutheran nations, however—despite their reputation for being the most secular countries in Europe—still stick to a more traditional pattern as far as confirmation is concerned, though the manner in which they do this is changing. Large numbers of young people now choose the option of a confirmation camp rather than a series of weekly meetings.7 In making this choice, confirmation becomes an “experience” in addition to a rite of passage, implying a better fit with other aspects of youth culture. The stress on experience is important in other ways as well. It can be seen in the choices that the religiously active appear to be making, at least in the British case. Here, within a constituency that is evidently reduced, two options stand out as disproportionately popular. The first is the conservative evangelical church—the success story of late twentieth-century churchgoing, both inside and outside the mainstream. These are churches that draw their members from a relatively wide geographical area and work on a congregational, rather than parish, model. Individuals are invited to opt in rather than opt out, and membership implies commitment to a set of specified beliefs and behavioral codes. For significant numbers of people, these churches offer firm boundaries, clear
28
6
Davie, Religion in Modern Europe, 71–2.
7
The figures for confirmation stay particularly high in Finland.
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
guidance, and considerable support—effective protection from the vicissitudes of life. Interestingly, however, it is the softer charismatic forms of evangelicalism that are doing particularly well; old-fashioned Biblicism, relatively speaking, is losing its appeal. Very different and less frequently recognized in the writing about religion in modern Britain (as indeed in Europe) is the evident popularity of cathedrals and city-center churches. Cathedrals and their equivalents deal with diverse constituencies. Working from the inside out, they are frequented by regular and irregular worshippers, pilgrims, visitors, and tourists, though the lines between these groups frequently blur. The numbers, moreover, are considerable—the more so on special occasions, both civic and religious. Hence, concerns about upkeep and facilities lead to difficult debates about finance. Looked at from the point of view of consumption, however, cathedrals are places that offer a distinctive product: traditional liturgy, top-class music, and excellence in preaching, all of which take place in a historic and often very beautiful building. A visit to a cathedral is an aesthetic experience, sought after by a wide variety of people, including those for whom membership or commitment presents difficulties. They are places where there is no obligation to opt in or to participate in communal activities beyond the service itself. In this respect, they become almost the mirror image of the evangelical churches already described.8 What then is the common feature in these very different stories? It is the experiential or “feel-good” factor, whether this be expressed in charismatic worship, in the tranquility of cathedral evensong, or in a special cathedral occasion (a candlelit carol service or a major civic event). The point is that we feel something; we experience the sacred, the set apart. The purely cerebral is less appealing. Durkheim was entirely correct in this respect: it is the taking part that matters for late modern populations and the feelings so engendered.9 If we feel nothing, we are much less likely either to take part in the first place or to continue thereafter.
New Arrivals The final factor in this complicated mosaic is somewhat different: the growing number of incomers in almost all European societies. There have been two stages in this process. The first was closely linked to the need for labor in the expanding economies of post-war Europe—notably in Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Wherever possible, each of these countries looked to its former empire to expand its workforce: Britain to the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent, France to the
8
The attraction of cathedrals and city-center churches is closely related to the growth in pilgrimage across Europe; see Davie, Religion in Modern Europe, 156–62.
9
See in particular Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; London: Harper Collins, 1976).
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Mahgreb, Germany (with no empire) to Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands to its overseas connections (Indonesia and Surinam), but also to Morocco. The second wave of immigration occurred in the 1990s and included, in addition to the places listed above, both the Nordic countries and the countries of Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal)—bearing in mind that the latter, until very recently, have been countries of emigration rather than immigration. The turnaround has been truly remarkable—the sharpest illustration of all being the transformation in the 1990s of Dublin, Ireland, from a relatively poor city to a thriving, expensive, and increasingly diverse place to live.10 Different host societies and different countries of provenance have led to a complex picture—generalization is dangerous. Some points are, however, common to most, if not all, cases. It is important to remember that those who are arriving in Europe are coming primarily for economic reasons—they are coming to work. If the first wave provided labor for expanding industrial economies, the second filled a rather different gap. As the twentieth century drew to a close, Europeans were becoming increasingly aware that there were insufficient numbers to employ in Europe to support the rising proportion of dependent people—notably the growing number of retired. The pull factor in this case is the shifting demographic profile in Europe. A second point follows from this: all is well, or relatively well, as long as there is sufficient work for everyone in an economy able to maintain the services necessary for incoming populations. All is less well when there is a downturn in the economy (as happened in the late 70s and 80s) or when those who work to support dependent Europeans become dependent themselves. Hence the unrest in France in the autumn of 2005: a population excluded both from the economy itself, and from its concomitant benefits, expressed its frustration on the streets. What, though, are the implications for the religious life of Europe? The short answer is that they vary from place to place depending on both host society and new arrivals. Britain and France offer an interesting comparison. In Britain immigration has been much more varied than in France, both in terms of provenance and in terms of faith communities. West Indians, for example, are Christians—and much more formed in their Christianity than their British equivalents. One result of this is the vibrant AfroCaribbean churches of Britain’s larger cities—some of the most active Christian communities in the country.11 From the sub-continent, moreover, come Sikhs and Hindus as well as a sizeable number of Muslims (1.5 million). Britain is also a country where ethnicity and religion criss-cross each other in a bewildering variety of ways (only Sikhs and Jews claim ethno-religious identities). The situation in France is very different:
10 In
terms of its religious life, Ireland is in many respects a “Mediterranean” country. It is also very like Poland, insofar as Catholicism has become a marker of national identity.
11 There
is a negative side to this story. For a variety of reasons, among them racism, Afro-Caribbeans were largely excluded from mainstream churches when they first arrived in Britain, an episode that the historic churches have come to regret bitterly.
30
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
here immigration has been largely from the Maghreb, as a result of which France has by far the largest Muslim community in Europe (between 5 and 6 million)—an almost entirely Arab population. Rightly or wrongly, “Arab” and “Muslim” have become interchangeable terms in popular parlance in France. Britain and France can be compared in other ways as well— Rightly or wrongly, “Arab” an exercise that provokes some interesting questions, among and “Muslim” have become them the tensions between democracy and tolerance. France, interchangeable terms in for example, is markedly more democratic than Britain on almost all institutional or constitutional measures. France is a popular parlance in France. Republic, with a secular state, two elected chambers, and no privileged church (in the sense of connections to the state). There is a correspondingly strong stress on the equality of all citizens whatever their ethnic or religious identity. Hence, France holds a strongly assimilationist policy towards incomers, with the express intention of eradicating difference—individuals who arrive in France are welcome to maintain their religious belief and practices, provided these are relegated to the private sphere. They are actively discouraged from developing any kind of group identity. Exactly the same point can be put as follows: any loyalty (religious or otherwise) that comes between the citizen and the state in France is regarded in negative terms. The result, whether intended or not, is a relative lack of tolerance, if by tolerance is meant the freedom to promote collective as well as individual expressions of religious identity—that is, those expressions that impact the public as well as the private sphere. Britain is very different. On a strict measure of democracy, Britain fares less well than France—with no written constitution, a monarchy, a half-reformed and so far unelected House of Lords, and an established church. More positively, Britain has a more developed tradition of accommodating group identities (including religious identities) within the framework of British society, a feature that owes a good deal to the relatively greater degree of religious pluralism that has existed in Britain for centuries rather than decades. Hence a markedly different policy towards newcomers: the goal becomes the accommodation of difference rather than its eradication. Rather more provocative, however, are the conclusions that emerge if you look carefully at who, precisely, in British society is advocating religious as opposed to ethnic toleration. Very frequently it turns out to be those in society who do not depend on an electoral mandate: the royal family, significant spokespersons in the House of Lords (where other faith communities are well represented by appointment, not by election), and prominent members of the established Church. The latter, in fact, become the protectors of “faith” in general rather than the protectors of specifically English expressions of Christianity.12
12 For
a more detailed presentation of this argument, including the discussion of specific examples, see Grace Davie, “Pluralism, Tolerance and Democracy: Theory and Practice in Europe,” The New Religious Pluralism and Democracy, ed. Thomas Banchoff (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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One further point is significant and reflects a shift that is taking place right across Europe. The growing presence of other faith communities in general, and of the Muslim population in particular, is challenging some deeply held European assumptions. The notion that faith is a private matter and should, therefore, be proscribed from public life—notably from the state and from the education system—is widespread in Europe (not only in France). Conversely, many of The growing presence of those who are currently arriving in this part of the world other faith communities in have markedly different convictions, and offer—simply by their presence—a challenge to the European way of doing general, and of the Muslim things. Reactions to this challenge vary from place to place, population in particular, is but at the very least, European societies have been obliged to re-open debates about the place of religion in public as challenging some deeply held well as private life—hence the heated controversies about European assumptions. the wearing of the veil in the school system and about the rights or wrongs of publishing material that one faith community in particular finds offensive. The repercussions of the now famous (or infamous) Danish cartoons are a case in point.13 The lack of comprehension on both sides of this affair, together with an unwillingness to compromise, led alarmingly fast to dangerous confrontations, both in Europe and beyond. Such episodes raise a further point which, if developed, could become an article in its own right. That is the extent to which the secular elites of Europe use these events in order to articulate an ideological alternative to religion. The point to grasp in the space that remains in this paper is that such elites—just like their religious alter-egos— vary markedly from place to place. The fact that the cartoons were first published in Denmark was not simply a coincidence; nor was the insistence on the part of the media in some countries rather than others (most notably France) that the cartoons should be repeatedly re-published in order to affirm the freedom of speech. Such attitudes have historical roots. France, for example, is the European society where the Enlightenment has been most obviously configured as a freedom from belief, an attitude which finds expression in the democratic, though not always very tolerant, institutions already described. In the United States, the Enlightenment becomes something very different: a freedom to believe. A developed treatment of this theme would reveal, however, that other European societies (much of Northern Europe, Germany, and Italy) fall somewhere between the two. Europe as ever is far from homogeneous.
13 The
cartoons were first published in the autumn of 2005 and reprinted in many parts of Europe in the early months of 2006. The depictions of Mohammed were considered derogatory by many sections of the Muslim community; for most Europeans, they were simply “cartoons.”
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Concluding Remarks Several things are happening simultaneously in the religious life of Europe. The fact that they are occurring at the same time is partly a coincidence—each, however, encourages the other. The historic churches, despite their continuing presence, are losing their capacity to discipline the religious thinking of large sections of the population (especially the young). Simultaneously, the range of religious choice is widening all the time both inside and outside the historic churches. New forms of religion are coming into Europe from outside, largely as the result of the movement of people. Finally, at least some of the people arriving from outside are offering a significant challenge to the widely held assumptions about the place of religion in European societies. It is equally clear that at least some aspects of exceptionality can be pursued by framing these statements in the form of questions, and by looking carefully at their implications for the religious life of Europe. For example: is Europe likely to produce a religious market like that found in the United States? The turn from obligation to consumption could be seen in this light. Conversely: is the residue of the state church sufficiently strong to resist this—maintaining thereby the notion of religion as a public utility rather than a freely chosen voluntary activity? And where in these complex equations do we place the newly arrived populations, whether Christian or not? The answers must be tentative, but I will offer three; the last takes the form of a cautious prediction about the future of religion in Europe. There are effectively two religious economies in Europe, which run alongside each other. The first is an incipient market, which is emerging among the churchgoing minorities of most, if not all, European societies, and in which voluntary membership is becoming the norm, de facto if not de jure. The second economy resists this tendency and continues to work on the idea of a public utility, in which membership remains ascribed rather than chosen. In this economy opting out, rather than opting in, remains the norm and is most visible at the time of a death. Interestingly, the two economies are in partial tension, but also depend upon each other—each fills the gaps exposed by the other. Exploring these tensions offers a constructive route into the complexities of European religion in the twenty-first century. Religion will increasingly penetrate the public sphere, a tendency driven largely by the presence of Islam in different parts of Europe. Paradoxically, in many ways this is easier for the active, increasingly voluntarist, Christian minorities to understand than those who remain passively attached to their (public) historic churches. For the former, seriously held belief leads to public implications; for the latter, seriously held belief is seen as a threat rather than an opportunity. The religious situation in Europe is and will remain distinctive (if not exceptional), given the legacies of the past. It is not, however, static. Clearly things are changing, 33
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and in some places very fast. Exactly how they will evolve is not easy to say, but I will conclude by making a cautious and three-fold prediction—the first part is tentative, the second more certain, and the third increasingly evident. First—I think that vicarious religion will endure at least until the mid-century, but maybe not for much longer. It follows that the actively religious in Europe will increasingly work on a market model, but the fact that their choices will include the historic churches complicates the issue (the alternatives are not as mutually exclusive as they first appear). Second—I know that the presence of Islam is a crucial factor that we ignore at our peril. Not only does it offer an additional choice, but it has become a catalyst of a much more profound change in the religious landscape of Europe. Finally, the combination of all these factors will increase rather than decrease the salience of religion in public, as well as private, debate—a tendency encouraged by the ever more obvious presence of religion in the modern world order. In this respect, the world is more likely to influence the religious life of Europe than the other way round.
34
Secularization and the Impotence of Individualized Religion Steve Bruce
T
he secularization paradigm combines two things: an assertion about changes in the presence and nature of religion, and a collection of related explanations of those changes. It is not a universally applicable scientific law, but a description and explanation of the past of European societies and their settler offspring. Contrary to often repeated caricatures, it is not a simple evolutionary model and does not imply a single uniform future—but it does suppose that there are “socio-logics” to societal changes. Some changes go together; others do not. For example, feudal societies can have effective state churches; culturally diverse liberal democracies cannot. And that is not an accident. As I show below, it can be explained by fundamental features of the latter sort of society. A full elaboration of the secularization paradigm with sufficient data to convince the open-minded (some people are beyond persuasion) needs at least a book and it took me three.1 All I can do here is offer a few illustrative facts, elaborate one part of the explanation, examine in some detail one alternative to the secularization paradigm, and request that the reader make the charitable assumption that I will have dealt with the obvious criticisms in other places.
1
See my books Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Choice and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
Steve Bruce has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen since 1991. He has written extensively on religion in the modern world and on the interaction of religion and politics. His most recent works in the sociology of religion are Fundamentalism (2001), God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (2002), and Politics and Religion (2003).
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Secularization In 1851 about half the population of Britain attended church regularly. Now it is about 8 percent. Statistical data on religious beliefs are available only for the last fifty or so years, but they show a similar trajectory to that of church attendance. There has been a steady decline in the popularity of orthodox Christian beliefs. On the existence of God, Britons now divide pretty equally between four positions: belief in a personal creator God, belief in “a higher power or life-force,” the wonderfully vague “there is something there,” and atheism or agnosticism. Baptism was once universal and so widely held to be essential that in the Middle Ages midwives were taught a simple formula to baptize babies thought unlikely to survive until the arrival of a priest. Now fewer than one-third of babies are baptized. In 1971 over two-thirds of weddings were religious; now it is less than one-third. There is no need to labor the point: anyone familiar with European societies will be aware of the drastic decline of organized religion. In Holland, the percentage of the adult population describing themselves as having no denomination rose from 14 percent in 1930 to 39 percent in 1997 and 42 percent in 2003.2 An overwhelming majority of Swedes (95 percent) seldom or never attend public worship, and Hamberg finds no evidence of revival in a situation that she describes as follows: the share of the population who adhere to Christian beliefs or who devote themselves to such traditional religious activities as prayer and church attendance declined in Sweden during the twentieth century…data indicate a decline not only in the prevalence of religious beliefs but also in the saliency of these beliefs.3 Even in the U.S., routinely held up as the great exception, churchgoing is now about 20 percent, down from about 50 percent in 1950. Equally important, those who still strongly associate with organized religion do so in a spirit markedly different than that of their grandparents. Most Christian churches have abandoned their supernatural focus, and the therapeutic benefits of faith (once firmly second place to placating God and ensuring salvation) are now advertised as the main point. The attitude of most believers has shifted: from being loyal followers to being selective consumers.
36
2
Nan Dirk De Graaf, Ariana Need, and Wout Ultee, “‘Losing My Religion’: A New and Comprehensive Explanation of Three Empirical Regularities Tested on Data for the Netherlands in 1998,” Patterns and Processes of Religious Change in Modern Industrial Societies—Europe and the United States, ed. Alasdair Crockett and Richard O’Leary (Lamenter: Edwin Millen, 1998) table 1.
3
Eva M. Hamberg, “Christendom in Decline: The Swedish Case,” The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf Astor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 47.
secularization and T he impotence of individualized religion / bruce
The explanation of the decline of religion is necessarily complex; the diagram I often use to illustrate the secularization paradigm has 21 boxes! I will mention here only a few of them. First, the idea that science displaces religion in a zero-sum contest to explain the world is largely a red herring. Contrary to the expectation of liberal theologians and advocates of the “higher criticism” in the 1890s, modern people seem quite capable of believing all sorts of twaddle (witness the popularity of alien abduction stories or theories of racial superiority). Insofar as science does impact faith, it is through technology (rightly or wrongly) giving us a sense that we are masters of our fate. Medieval peasants quite reasonably saw themselves as being of no significance in the eyes of either their worldly masters or their Creator God. Modern Western consumers think rather highly of themselves: they choose their microwaves, they choose their governments, and they choose which God to believe in and in what manner. Crucial to the marginalization of religion has been the combination of egalitarianism, individualism, and diversity. Any belief system is at its most plausible when it is entirely consensual. If everyone believes the same things, they are not beliefs; they are merely an accurate account of how things are. Using the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger drew our attention to the impact of the “pluralization of life-worlds” on the plausibility of religious belief systems: Our situation is characterized by a market of world views, simultaneously in competition with each other. In this situation the maintenance of certitudes that go much beyond the empirical necessities of the society and the individual to function is very difficult indeed. Inasmuch as religion essentially rests upon supernatural certitudes, the pluralistic situation is a secularizing one and, ipso facto, plunges religion into a crisis of credibility.4 Diversity, of course, need not provoke doubt. The first response to such a cognitive threat is usually martial: the deviants are murdered, expelled, or forcibly converted. This is where egalitarianism becomes relevant. In the modernizing industrial societies of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it became increasingly accepted that, despite obvious differences of birth, status, and talents, we were all in some sense much-of-a-muchness. People became reluctant to enforce religious conformity and ruling classes came to see social harmony as more important than religious orthodoxy. The Reformation insistence on the responsibilities of the individual gradually became a demand for the rights of the individual and rights gradually became separated from religious identities. Unless it is prepared to accept high levels of social conflict (and none were), the modernizing state, if it has to encompass diversity, must become increasingly religiously neutral. The public square is gradually evacuated. This not only removes formal state
4
Peter L. Berger, Facing Up to Modernity (Hammondsport: Penguin, 1979) 213.
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support for a particular religion; more importantly—and this is where Berger’s concern with “taken-for grantedness” is vital—it removes a whole range of opportunities for the religious tradition to be reinforced in day-to-day interaction. Where a community shares a common faith, big events such as births, deaths, and marriages can be glossed by the shared religion. The passing of the seasons can be similarly treated. And everyday conversation can reinforce the shared beliefs as people gloss even mundane matters such as the weather and crop yields in religious terms. The fragmentation of the religious culture into a range of competing alternatives drastically curtails the routine low-level social reinforcement of beliefs. When we can no longer be sure that those we meet share our faith, we tend to keep it to ourselves.
When we can no longer be sure that those we meet share our faith, we tend to keep it to ourselves.
At the societal level, the long-term result is a shift to evermore liberal and tolerant forms of religion and eventually to benign indifference. When all faiths are in some sense equally valid, parents lack an incentive to indoctrinate their children, and the environment proves stony ground for such seeds of faith as are planted.
In the terms of the classic typology of religious forms derived from Weber and Troeltsch, the church form of religion (with a single shared culture and institution providing a single plausibility structure for an entire society) becomes rare: it survives only in situations (Poland until 1990, Ireland until the 1960s) where the Church acts as a guarantor of national identity and integrity. And when that role becomes redundant, rates of adherence drop rapidly as the Church comes to be seen as just another pressure group. Here I will add a brief aside. Recent concern about Islamic fundamentalism in the West and about the reaction of some Western Muslims to such foreign policy matters as the war in Iraq and the Palestinian problem has led some commentators to consider that the church form of religion might enjoy a revival. The idea is that Islamic challenges to Western liberalism and secularity might stimulate a Christian revival, as Europeans with a nominal commitment to their previously dominant Christian traditions feel moved to explore their heritage faith and then acquire a real commitment to it. A revival of concerns about the public presence of one religion might encourage a revival in the more conventional sense. This seems a forlorn hope. Beyond the observation that those people who described themselves as “Christian” in England and Wales in the 2001 census is vastly greater than the number who ever trouble a Christian church, there is as yet no empirical evidence for revival. Insofar as fears of militant Islam are having any effect on secularization in Europe, it seems the opposite of that hoped for by church leaders. Because most Britons lack any acquaintance with Christianity (let alone a commitment to it) they see Islamic militancy not as proof that Islam is a bad religion, but as confirmation that any religion taken too seriously is a bad thing. To return to the typology of forms, the sect can survive if it can insulate itself from the wider society (possible in parts of the U.S., impossible in European societies), but this 38
secularization and T he impotence of individualized religion / bruce
comes at the cost of considerable sacrifice by its members. The denomination gradually declines because its members lack powerful incentives to indoctrinate their children. Which brings us to the cult. The term is often casually used to mean any small new religion we do not like. I use it to mean a diffuse, extremely tolerant form of religion that stresses private experience and grants to the individual the primary authority to decide what he or she will believe. This form of religion exists not in large formal organizations but in a milieu: a world of overlapping outlets and expressions through which individual consumers chart their own paths of preference. It is the future of this form of religion that I want to consider in the rest of this essay.
Diffuse Spirituality Many of the counters to the secularization paradigm are based on the belief that people are essentially religious. Religion is not seen as a social accomplishment (like, for example, speaking French) but as an expression of an innate biological need. The twin facts that we all die and that we can distinguish the self from the body cause us all to ask what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate questions.” If it is the case that we all have a need for religion, then long-term secularization is impossible. If specific religions decline in popularity, then others must arise to fill the gap. For a brief time in the 1970s it looked as if a variety of usually Eastern-inspired new religious movements (NRMs) were going to fill the space left by the decline of the Christian churches, but it quickly became obvious that the scale was wrong. When the Moonies could never muster more than one thousand members in Britain and all the NRMs together did not come close to the numbers lost by the main churches in a month, hoping that these innovations could restore the religious capital of 1900 or 1950 was like setting a toy train engine to pull real freight wagons. A more plausible candidate is the highly personalized individualistic “New Age” spirituality of the cultic milieu. Regis Debray made the point elegantly in saying that the twilight of the gods was the “morning of the magicians.”5 The two are certainly related on the supply side. The decline of the Christian churches has negated their power to stigmatize alternatives as foreign and dangerous. In 2005, a serving naval officer managed to establish paganism as a legitimate religion that the British armed services should accommodate. As Partridge notes, there has been a vast increase in the range of spiritual revelations and therapies on offer in the West.6 But we should not confuse supply and demand measures. What matters for testing the secularization thesis is not the range of spiritual offerings being purveyed but the numbers who take them up and the spirit in which they do so.
5
Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary (London: Verso, 2004) 259.
6
Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Clark, 2004).
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Table 1. Experience and Salience of the New Age, Scotland 2001 Horoscopesa %
Divinationb %
Yoga or Meditation %
Alternative Medicinec %
Very important
1
2
3
5
Quite important
4
4
7
15
Not very important
21
13
9
20
Not at all important
15
11
4
5
Never tried
59
70
78
55
Note: Sample size for this table was 1,605. Percentage totals vary from 100 because of rounding. a Consulting horoscopes in newspapers and magazines. b Consulting a tarot card reader, fortune teller, or astrologer (excluding horoscopes in papers and magazines). c Alternative or complementary medicine such as herbal remedies, homeopathy, or aromatherapy.
In 2001, the Scottish Social Attitudes survey asked a representative sample if they had ever tried a variety of arguably New Age activities such as tarot cards, fortune telling, astrology, yoga or meditation, alternative medicines or therapies, and horoscopes; and if they had, how important were these in their lives.7 Table 1 summarizes the replies. Most Scots have not tried these things, particularly those that represent a significant commitment, and of those who have tried them, most do not think them very important. The questions are perhaps too blunt to make much of the answers, but there is a clear pattern that fits well with what colleagues at the University of Lancaster have found in their study of New Age providers and consumers in Kendal, a small town in the northwest of England.8 Led by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, the research team used a wide variety of techniques to identify everything (from organized yoga classes to one-to-one therapies) that could be seen as New Age activity, and through detailed interviewing and surveying compiled a reasonable estimate. They concluded that between one and two percent of the population are involved in the holistic milieu in a typical week. But it is worth looking more closely at the activities they survey. Table 2 summarizes the distribution of holistic milieu activities under nine headings.9
40
7
Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning, “Religious Beliefs and Differences,” Devolution—Scottish Answers to Scottish Questions, ed. Catherine Bromley, John Curtice, Kerstin Hinds, and Alison Park (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003) 86–115.
8
Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
9
I am grateful to friend and collaborator David Voas, of the University of Manchester, for preparing these summaries of the Kendal data. The original data is publicly available at <www.kendalproject.org.uk>.
secularization and T he impotence of individualized religion / bruce
Table 2. Participation in the Holistic Milieu, Kendal 2000–02 Activity
%
Yoga and tai chi
45.5
Dancing, singing, art and craft
5.6
Massage, bodywork
13.9
Homeopathy
3.6
Counselling
3.5
Healing and complementary health groups
11.2
Reiki or spiritual healing
6.1
Specialized spiritual/religious groups
5.6
Miscellaneous one-to-one
5.0
It is hard not to be struck by how few activities listed are obviously spiritual. Over half of all involvement is in what most people would view as leisure or recreation: yoga, tai chi, dance, singing, art. Add in pampering (massage, bodywork) and you have covered nearly two-thirds. Not all the “healing and complementary health groups” are obviously spiritual or even unconventional; CancerCare, winner of the Queen’s Jubilee Award for Voluntary Service in the Community, is one of the larger ones. A fair proportion of the healing activities are based on distinctive beliefs, but even these (for example, homeopathy, reiki) seem pseudoscientific rather than necessarily spiritual. Fortunately, we do not have to argue about the nature of the activity or its significance for those involved because Heelas and Woodhead asked their respondents whether they saw their activities as spiritual. Only 51 percent of respondents saw their yoga classes as spiritual; for the massage category, the percentage spiritual was only 28 percent; for osteopathy only 10 percent; for “foot massage” (which involved typically 48 people) the figure was 25 percent. Only some 45 percent of those engaged in holistic milieu activities think of them as spiritual. Fewer than half of the respondents said that their participation had anything whatsoever to do with spiritual growth. In their defense of all this activity as a “spiritual revolution,” Heelas and Woodhead assert that “the figure we have arrived at for the holistic milieu…shows that Bruce…is wrong when he claims that ‘the number of people [in Britain] who have shown any interest in alternative religions is minute.’”10 It would be unproductive to argue over what is or is not “minute,” but the implications of their own work seem very clear. Taking New Age spirituality at its narrowest, it is trivial. In order to get over 1 percent
10 Heelas
and Woodhead 54–5.
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of the population, we need to encompass a variety of imported recreational activities, miscellaneous methods of relaxation, and diverse forms of alternative medicine, all practiced mainly by people who do not even pretend to see them as spiritual. Rather than seeing the New Age as compensating for a decline in Christianity, we should see it as an extension of the surgery, the clinic, the gym, or the beauty salon. It is primarily concerned with physical and psychological wellbeing.
The Future of the New Age To strengthen the proposition that what we are seeing is the decline of one form of religion rather than secularization per se, Heelas and Woodhead predict that the holistic milieu will double in size over the next forty to fifty years.11 This seems highly unlikely. They admit that at present holistic spirituality has a rather narrow socio-demographic appeal, and that the relevant section of the population (educated, middle-aged white women in people-orientated professions) may be approaching saturation point. Far from growing, it is not even clear that the holistic milieu can reproduce itself. Asked if their children were interested in the activity, two-thirds of respondents with offspring said “no.” Heelas is more struck by the fact that 32 percent said “yes,” but this level of transmission is disastrous.12 In a society where parents have only two children on average, 100 percent of them must be socialized into a practice for it to survive in the long term. Intergenerational transmission of Christian affiliation, attendance, and belief currently stands at about 50 percent, which is widely regarded as a major problem for churches.13 On the face of it the New Age has an even higher mountain to climb, not least because women with spiritual interests are more likely than average to be childless. In summary, an extremely detailed community study conducted by commentators sympathetic to New Age spirituality fails to convince us that this milieu comes close to providing a viable substitute for the decline of the Christian churches. Back to our toy train metaphor: the scale is wrong.
Self and Other Religions Not only is the New Age world very small, but there are good reasons to describe it as fragile. The weakness of community in the New Age is not an accident but an inevitable consequence of its solipsistic basis of authority. In the New Age, the self is the
11 Heelas
and Woodhead 137.
12 Paul
Heelas and Benjamin Seel, “An Ageing New Age?” Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures, ed. Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 234.
13 David
Voas, “Intermarriage and the Demography of Secularization,” British Journal of Sociology 54.1 (2003): 83–108.
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final arbiter of truth and utility. If it works for you, it is true. There is no legitimate basis for imposing on others or even arguing. This makes any sort of concerted activity remarkably difficult. If two people disagree, there is no basis for settling the dispute. This explains why, for all the talk of counter-cultural and alternative community, New Age spirituality has not produced its alternative schools and communes. Although they do not appreciate the significance of their own examples (they want to describe New Agers as a “tribe”), Prince and Riches’s study of New Age in Glastonbury provides glaring examples of an inability to cooperate.14 In one example, a primary school collapsed because parents could not agree on how or what they wanted their children taught. In another, a small group of New Agers decided to meet regularly on Sunday mornings for some sort of collective act of “worship.” At the first meeting they talked about what they would do but could not agree. Fewer attended the second meeting and the initiative petered out. The Glastonbury ethnography raises an interesting genLeft to our own devices a eral problem that first occurred to me while lecturing to combination of sloth and students about the social reforms pioneered by British self-interest will always make evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that sacrifice unlikely. the civilization of industrial society owes a great deal to committed Christians. The ending of slavery, limitations on the use of women and children in factories, controls on exploitation of workers, the construction of decent housing for workers, improvements in prisons, penny savings banks, mutual insurance, workers’ educational institutes, public schooling for the poor—all of these were the results of philanthropic activity by people who were driven by the related ideas that we could hardly expect the poor to be concerned about their souls when their bodies were sore oppressed and that a society that claimed to be Christian could not also be barbarous. Against that example, the social impact of New Agers seems trivial, and I take two points from the comparison. First, only a religion that has an authoritative reference point outside the individual is capable of providing a challenge to any status quo. Left to our own devices a combination of sloth and self-interest will always make sacrifice unlikely. Although New Agers are fond of talking of their revelations and therapies as life-changing, in practice mostly what changes is merely attitudes to their circumstances. The anxious repressed merchant banker who takes up yoga or meditation does not cease to be a banker; he may acquire a certain detachment from his work role and become a more contented holistic banker, but he continues in the mainstream. A very small number will “downsize.”
14 Ruth
Prince and David Riches, The New Age in Glastonbury: The Construction of Religious Movements (New York: Berghahn, 2000) 166–7, 176–8.
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They sell the expensive house in London and retreat to a cottage in Wales or Cumbria to make pottery and run weekend workshops in reiki healing. But the significance for the wider society is negligible. Worse, in many cases the change is no more than the acquisition of a new language to defend old patterns of behavior. Consider the example of sexual exploitation. In reading a number of accounts of Findhorn, Europe’s oldest New Age center, I am struck by how often male New Agers manage to seduce younger women by persuading them that getting in touch with their true feelings, discovering the angel within, coming into their power, or creating authentic relationships means having sex.15 To use the formal language of Max Weber, world-rejecting religion seems only possible if there is a shared external authoritative source of revelation: the God who punishes those who step out of line. If the only source of authority is the self—as in the classic New Age slogan, “to your own self be true”—any new perspective or revelation is more likely to be assimilated to our current circumstances than to provoke change. Second, whereas the Victorian evangelical movement was more than the sum of its parts because it was made up of individuals who were bound together by a shared faith, the New Age movement is always less than the sum of its parts because even the highly motivated and genuinely counter-cultural core is not united by common beliefs and values. Or to be more precise, it is united only in highly abstract operating and epistemological principles such as, “No one has the right to tell anyone else what to do.” My purpose here is not to criticize New Age spirituality (though that is hard to resist); it is to explain why it fails to resist co-option and bastardization. Since the 1960s elements of the entire world’s religious repertoire have been imported to Britain, but instead of secular Britons being transformed by Chinese necromancy, Native American sweat lodges, and Hindu notions of karma, the innovations have been stripped of their religious content.16 In its original context, feng sui is a serious matter of relating to the spirits of the dead. In Britain, it is a decorating style. Yoga is no longer a spiritual discipline; it is an exercise program. Meditation is not about attaining enlightenment; it is about relaxing. And ayur vedic medicine is just another cosmetics line from the Body Shop chain.
Conclusion I have concentrated on New Age spirituality because it encourages us to move part of the secularization debate forward. In Britain the Christian churches have shrunk to a point where reproduction is threatened, the major non-Christian religions brought to
15 Steve
Bruce, “Good Intentions and Bad Sociology: New Age Authenticity and Social Roles,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 13.1 (1998): 23–36.
16 Bruce,
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God Is Dead, 118–39.
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Britain by migrants since 1945 have not recruited beyond their original ethnic bases, and 1970s NRMs have failed to make any headway. We now have a society that is very largely secular, not just in the formal operations of major social institutions but also in popular culture. We are in a historically novel position. Over the next thirty or so years, we may be able to see if societies are religious because people are religious, or vice versa. If it is the case that people are in some sense enduringly interested in the religious and the spiritual (and thus our current secularity is temporary), then we should soon see evidence for this. New Age spirituality would seem to be a strong candidate for the future of religion because its individualistic consumerist ethos fits well with the spirit of the age. What is needed is serious research directed to assessing the spread, significance, and impact of alternative forms of spirituality. To date, little work has gone beyond being impressed by the growth of the supply of spiritual innovations. Such work as has attempted to measure demand suggests that alternative spiritualities will not refute the secularization paradigm.
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Challenging Secularization Theory: The Growth of “New Age” Spiritualities of Life Paul Heelas
O
f the various meanings which have come to be associated with the term “spirituality,” one is readily identifiable. Spirituality is taken to be life itself—the “life force” or “energy” that sustains life in this world, and what lies at the heart of subjective life—the core of what it is to be truly alive. It is part and parcel with authentic ways of being—as when one hears that “spirituality is love, love is spirituality.” “New Age” spiritualities of life—or contemporary spiritualities of life—can be distinguished from theistic spiritualities. Whereas New Age spiritualities are experienced as emanating from the depths of life within the here-and-now, the spirituality of the Holy Spirit, the spirituality of obeying the will of God, or the spirituality of experiencing the God-head itself are understood as emanating from the transcendental realm to serve life in this world. Take away the theistic God of religious tradition, and there is little left of Christianity (or theistic traditions); take away the God of theism, and New Age spiritualities of life remain virtually intact. The key words of New Age spiritualities are “experience” and “practice.” Rather than attaching importance to the beliefs, doctrines, and ethical injunctions of theistic traditions, importance is attached to experiencing the heart of life. Practices are taken to facilitate the inner quest. Drawn from many sources, most especially the spiritual “traditions” of the East, activities range from yoga (the most popular) to spiritual massage (also popular), from reiki to spiritual forms of the Alexander Technique. Enabling spiritual seekers to make contact with their inner depths, seekers experience spirituality
Paul Heelas is Professor in Religion and Modernity in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University. Being a classic “baby boomer” (born 1946) and having lived through the 60s whilst at University, he is especially interested in tracing how inner life spiritualities have developed and changed—a topic which is explored in his forthcoming volume, Spiritualities of Life: From the Romantics to Wellbeing Culture.
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flowing through other aspects of their personal lives—their bodies, their emotions, their relationships. To draw on a term that has acquired wide currency, namely “mindbody-spirit,” this is therefore mind-body-spirit spirituality.
The Growth of New Age Spiritualities in the West Concluding his discussion of religion and “alternative” spirituality in Britain, Steve Bruce writes that “in so far as we can measure any aspect of religious interest, belief or action and can compare 1995 with 1895, the only description for the change between the two points is ‘decline.’”1 Accordingly, secularization theory can be applied to explain decline “across the board.” But there is at least one major problem with the across-theboard application of secularization theory. Whether it be the beliefs and interests of individuals, specialized associational activities, institutional cultures or widely available cultural provisions such as books, New Age spiritualities of life have grown. Evidence is provided by the growth of the “holistic milieu,” namely associational activities, of a group or one-to-one variety, run by mind-body-spirit practitioners, which take place within their own self-contained contexts rather than within and with reference to broader institutional contexts like schools or businesses. From October 2000 to June 2002 I was part of a research team studying spirituality and religion in the market town and regional center of Kendal, a gateway to the Lake District of England. A primary aim of the Kendal Project was to establish whether the holistic milieu of the town and immediate environs (population 37,150) had grown, and if so, to what extent. By way of several methods, including use of British Telecom Archives of the Cumbria and North Lancashire Yellow Pages running back to 1969, we established that there were virtually no holistic, mind-body-spirit activities in 1970. At the time of our research, however, there were 126 separate activities provided by 95 spiritual practitioners—41 practitioners served 63 different groups and 63 practitioners worked with individual clients (9 practitioners served both groups and individual clients). Including the practitioners, 600 people were involved with mind-body-spirit activities during a typical week, amounting to 1.6 percent of the total population of Kendal and the immediate environs.2 Even in the Glastonbury of 1970, there were very few holistic milieu activities of the kind found today. However, there are very good reasons to suppose that over 900,000 inhabitants of Great Britain are now active on a weekly basis in the holistic milieu of
1
Steve Bruce, “Religion in Britain at the Close of the 20th Century: A Challenge to the Silver Lining Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 11.3 (1996): 273.
2
For more on the Kendal Project, and on some of the data that follow in this essay, see Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). See also <www.kendalproject.org.uk>.
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the nation—a not inconsiderable figure. Yoga, with around 400,000 participants, is of greater numerical significance than the regular participants of Methodist congregations (372,600) or Pentecostal churches (216,400); the number of holistic milieu practitioners (146,000) is considerably in excess of National Health Service general practitioners (37,352). In the U.S., the holistic milieu of the nation has grown from being tiny in 1970 (an obvious exception being the San Francisco Bay area) to between 2.5 and 8 percent of the total population. A poll carried out by the Harris Interactive Service Bureau in 2003 found that 7 percent of U.S. adults, or 15 million people, practice yoga—an increase of 28.5 percent from the previous year. Not all practice yoga in associational milieu settings, but many do. Additional evidence is provided by the growth of complementary and alternative forms of “medicine” (CAM), which are often provided by mind-body-spirit practitioners. According to David Eisenberg, et al., for example, survey research suggests a “47.3% increase in total visits to alternative medicine practitioners, from 427 million in 1990 to 629 million in 1997, thereby exceeding total visits to all US primary care physicians.”3 Turning to evidence of growth within mainstream institutions, all the schools of England and Wales are legally required to attend to the spiritual development of their pupils. As defined by Ofsted (the government’s inspection agency), “spiritual development” relates “to that aspect of inner life through which pupils acquire insights into their personal existence which are of enduring worth…a non-material dimension to life,” it being explicitly stated that “‘spiritual’ is not synonymous with religious.”4 Given that Ofsted visits schools to judge the quality of provisions for spiritual education, it is not surprising to find evidence that inner life spirituality is becoming more significant within the mainstream educational system. Many primary schools now provide yoga and tai chi for their pupils (and parents); some have special areas where pupils can go for creative, calming, and holistic therapies. Within another sphere of public services, the National Health Service, government charters and plans state that nurses must attend to “the spiritual needs” of their patients. Although this includes attending to the “spiritual needs” of theistic believers, it is clear that patients and their nurses are increasingly concerned with holistic, mind-body-spirit spirituality. And so are doctors. By 2001, almost half of the general practices in England were providing access to CAM activities, with almost one-third of activities being provided “in-house” by doctors themselves or their staff. Regarding the U.S., much the same picture is to be found, one indicator being that some 10 percent of hospitals now provide alternative forms of healing, often with a spiritual orientation.5
48
3
David M. Eisenberg, et al., “Trends in Alternative Medicine Use in the United States, 1990–1997,” Journal of the American Medical Association 280.18 (11 November 1998): 1,569.
4
Cited in Heelas and Woodhead 71–2.
5
Evidence is provided by Paul Heelas, “Nursing Spirituality,” Spirituality and Health International (forthcoming): 1–16.
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Holistic spirituality is also a growing presence within the heartlands of capitalism. According to Douglas Hicks in his study of current interest in religion and spirituality in U.S. companies, “along with a new public Christian evangelicalism, New Age language fundamentally shapes discussions of contemporary workplace spirituality.”6 Indeed, surveying the evidence provided by the numerous companies which have incorporated “the sacred,” it can be argued that inner life spirituality has become more significant than Christianity, with many employees (especially in larger companies) participating in trainings, courses, and seminars that aim to release and optimize the resources that lie within—including what spiritual “energy,” “wisdom,” and “creativity” have to offer. In terms of the numerical significance of inner life beliefs Holistic spirituality is also a among the general population, the best evidence to date is growing presence within the provided by Eileen Barker. Drawing on the 1998 Religious heartlands of capitalism. and Moral Pluralism (RAMP) survey of eleven European countries, she reports that 29 percent agree with the statement, “I believe that God is something within each person, rather than something out there,” with an additional 15 percent agreeing with the statement, “I believe in an impersonal spirit or life force.”7 In the U.S., the importance of inner life spirituality is indicated by George Gallup and Timothy Jones’s finding that “almost a third of our survey defined spirituality with no reference to…a higher authority,” a typical response being that spirituality is “the essence of my personal being.”8 Although comparison is not made easier by virtue of the fact that survey questions have tended to change over the years, it is safe to say that the picture of Europe and Britain over time adds up to one of growth. In sum, with no (significant) indices of decline, we can reverse Bruce’s assessment to conclude that “the only description for…change…is ‘growth.’”
The “Symptom of Secularization” Defense Faced with evidence of growth, across-the-board secularization theorists have adopted the strategy of arguing that expansion is more apparent than real. The argument is that a great deal of holistic mind-body-spirit spirituality is part of the very process of secularization itself. As David Voas and Steve Bruce make the point, “Unconventional spiri-
6
Douglas A. Hicks, Religion and the Workplace: Pluralism, Spirituality, Leadership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 31.
7
Eileen Barker, “The Church without and the God within: Religiosity and/or Spirituality?” Religion and Patterns of Social Transformation, ed. D. M. Jerolimov, S. Zrinscak and I. Borowik (Zagreb: Institute for Social Research, 2004) 38.
8
George Gallup, Jr., and Timothy Jones, The Next American Spirituality (Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor, 2000) 49.
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tuality is a symptom of secularisation, not a durable counterforce to it.”9 Compared to the “real thing”—religious tradition—New Age spiritualities of life are impoverished, vague, attenuated, and quasi-spiritual, if not secular. To discuss this defense in connection with the Kendal Project, Voas and Bruce draw attention to the finding that nearly half of the respondents to the questionnaire sent to all the participants of the holistic milieu did not consider their activities to be of spiritual significance. Although all the practitioners might have been providing activities that they understood to be spiritual, a considerable number of group members or one-to-one clients understood homeopathy or osteopathy, for example, as devoid of spirituality. However, Voas and Bruce do not take into account the finding that 82 percent of all respondents agreed with the statement that “some sort of spirit or life force pervades all that lives,” with 73 percent agreeing that there is “subtle energy (or energy channels) in the body.” Furthermore, 71 percent rated “spirituality” between 6 and 10 on a scale from 1 (not at all important) to 10 (very important), with 38 percent selecting 10. The milieu is thus by no means secular as the understanding of activities by some participants might lead one to suppose; Voas and Bruce themselves write that questionnaire responses are “extraordinarily high on unconventional beliefs.”10 As for elsewhere in Britain, Suzanne Hasselle-Newcombe’s study of the Iyengar Yoga Jubilee Convention held at Crystal Palace, London, during 2002 finds much the same picture: 83 percent of questionnaire respondents “describe themselves as having a spiritual life” whilst 47 percent have a “‘spiritual’ interest in their practice.”11 The extent to which the holistic milieu differs from the secular is seen in the criticisms directed at CAM by scientific researchers. To mention just one critic, Raymond Tallis, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, writes that acupuncturists require one to believe ideas about illness for which there is no evidence, other than the sacred texts of Chinese medicine: that there are patterns of energy flow (Qi) throughout the body that are essential for health; that disease is due to disruptions of this flow; and that acupuncture corrects the disruptions and suggests that such practitioners use “untested medicines invested with the magic of antiquity and the subversive charm of irrationality.”12 From the perspective of critics
9
David Voas and Steve Bruce, “The Spiritual Revolution: Another False Dawn for the Sacred,” A Sociology of Spirituality, ed. Kieran Flanagan and Peter Jupp (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
10 Voas
and Bruce.
11 Suzanne
Hasselle-Newcombe, “Spirituality and ‘Mystical Religion’ in Contemporary Society: A Case Study of British Practitioners of the Iyengar Method of Yoga,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 20.3 (2005): 312.
12 Raymond Tallis,
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Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents (London: Atlantic, 2004) 129, 133.
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like Tallis, a chasm exists between the explanations and procedures of orthodox medicine and CAM—a chasm that reveals the extent to which beliefs like “subtle energy (or energy channels) in the body” deviate from the secular world of science. It is true that some of those participating in the holistic milieu of Britain (as elsewhere) are simply doing yoga for stress relief (for example). It is also true that a smallish minority (probably in the order of 20 percent) do not acknowledge belief in inner spirituality or spiritual energy. The fact remains, though, that the great majority of participants accept spirituality, and those who do not sometimes accept the existence of scientifically untenable states of affairs, such as the operation of non-material, invisible chakras.13 Generally speaking, the holistic milieu activities of Western countries are not the “last gasp” of the sacred sought out by those who are happy to make do with the impoverished. Without going into detail here, the growth of the milieu attests to its vitality—a vitality which owes a considerable amount to the fact that the milieu (in any particular locality and beyond) works by way of shared, mutually confirmed, “cultural” values, expectations, key terms (like “spiritual energy” or “life force”), and key experiences (like “harmony,” “inner healing,” or “holistic wellbeing”).14
Explaining Growth With secularization theory very much dwelling on the decline of religious tradition in “Western” settings, the challenge is to develop alternative explanations—explanations that specifically attend to the growth of New Age spiritualities of life. The development of the assumptions, beliefs, and values of the autonomous self during modernity is pivotal. The argument is basically simple. Whatever the reasons for this development—which are multiple—the autonomous self has to have what Lionel Trilling refers to as “internal space.”15 To be autonomous the self must act on the basis of what belongs to itself. Appropriate subjectivities, taking place within internal “space” and which can only be experienced by the self, are required for the self to be able to consider itself able to exercise control, make judgments, act on the world, express itself, and grow whilst being true to itself. Much of the content of the autonomous self of Western societies is (relatively) secular: the “mind” itself; “will” and the ability to exercise “will power”; being “imaginative” and “creative”; regulating one’s “emotions” to
13 See
Paul Heelas, “The Holistic Milieu and Spirituality: Reflections on Voas and Bruce,” A Sociology of Spirituality, ed. Kieran Flanagan and Peter Jupp (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
14 See
Paul Heelas, “The Infirmity Debate: On the Viability of New Age Spiritualities of Life,” Journal of Contemporary Religion (forthcoming).
15 Lionel
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1974) 24. For a brilliant analysis of the muting of “inner space” in a culture where individual autonomy is equally muted, see Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).
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exercise authority; calling one’s “intuition,” “experience,” or one’s sense of what “feels right” into play to make decisions; being “authentic,” honest about oneself, emotionally “intelligent” in dealing with malfunctioning relationships. However, given the value ascribed to being autonomous, an effective way of informing, articulating, or emphasizing autonomy is by locating the “sacred”—with its powers—within the subjectivities of the self. And indeed a considerable body of evidence shows that autonomous selves are much more likely than conformist selves to hold inner life, spiritual beliefs.16 As the sociocultural order becomes increasingly restrictive, people increasingly come to value their freedom. The becomes increasingly “ideology” of autonomy, which is certainly deeply rooted in “Western cultures,” comes to the fore precisely when it restrictive, people increasingly is most threatened. The fact that people are “determined” come to value their freedom. to be free—maybe in one sense of the word (in line with Foucault), but certainly in the sense of their own self-determination—counters the Foucault-inspired objection that “autonomy” is subverted by implicit regulatory or constructivist processes.
As the sociocultural order
Another question arises in relation to the argument I have outlined: surely it is perfectly possible to be autonomous without buttressing the exercise of freedom by way of inner spirituality? Given that this question has to be answered in the affirmative, we then have to ask: why do some people, but not others, believe in the sacred within? Unfortunately, critical, detailed evidence has yet to be provided. Other than those participating in holistic milieu activities, we know very little about the gender, occupational, age, educational, etc. profiles, or the values and worldviews of those in the population at large who believe in the sacred within, and not “simply” in being autonomous. Neither do we have a clear idea of the number of people who do not go to church (or other places of worship) on a regular basis, who value autonomy, but who continue to believe that the sacred is primarily located in the transcendental realm. I strongly suspect, however, that an ingredient which has to be added to the autonomy argument lies with the role played by the mysteries of life. In 1841 Feuerbach wrote that “Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself.”17 What he called “religion,” Feuerbach argued, is increasingly found within our consciousness—our consciousness of our infinite, mysterious nature. Scientific advance since the time of Feuerbach has done nothing to dispel the inexplicable nature of consciousness and life. Indeed, as Einstein was fond of observing, scientific progress highlights the unknown. Whether it be life or the universe, there must be something more that is way
16 See Heelas and Woodhead 113–23; see, in particular, the pioneering research carried out by S. Houtman
and D. P. Mascini, “Why Do Churches Become Empty, While New Age Grows?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41.3 (2002): 455–73.
17 Ludwig
52
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957) 13–4.
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beyond our ken as mere partially evolved mortals. And the more you think about it, the more mysterious it becomes. The irreducibility of the great mysteries… Especially with the decline of belief in the transcendental world since the time of Feuerbach, if the sacred is to be located in this world (and where else can it go?) it will be in the realm of the mysterious: the realm that exists beyond the mere materialities of the secular world—a realm that can be experienced but not grasped by the mind. In Durkheimian fashion, the “sacred” is quite naturally associated with the most important, ultimate of cultural values. Hence, it is the interior home for many of the “free spirits” who value the autonomous way of being. The “sacred” also quite naturally dwells with the mysterious. Hence the probability that it has its interior home with those who are most aware of the unfathomable, inexplicable depths of life (or, as with Einstein and other preeminent scientists, the universe). I predict that research will show that those whose self-reflexivity about life has been stimulated by college or university education (especially in the humanities and social sciences), then exercised by careers in personcentered jobs (most obviously hospices) where “meaning and purpose” issues come to the fore, will be most aware of the mysteries of life. Such people, who almost certainly value autonomy, are therefore the most likely to hold beliefs of the kind reported by Eileen Barker; or to participate in holistic milieu activities to explore the significance of their lives by plumbing the depths of “life” affirming life. Just as the powers, capacities, and value of the inner life mean a great deal to the autonomous self, so the question of what it means to be alive means a great deal to those who adhere to the ethic of humanity. Assessing the significance of the “religion of humanity,” as he called it, Durkheim claimed that the ethic has become a fact, it has penetrated our institutions and our mores, it has blended with our whole life, and if, truly, we had to give it up, we would have to recast our whole moral organization at the same stroke.18 Durkheim’s claim is even more justified today, at least in “the West.” Fuelling the value of freedom by way of the importance attached to the value of “respecting the other,” and the associated institutionalization of human rights, the core value of the ethic in fact lies with life itself. The basic assumption of the ethic is that life itself—what we all share by virtue of the life of humanity—lies beyond “difference” (ethnic, gendered, national, etc.). Other values—for example equality and respecting the other—flow from this. Acknowledging that no one human being is the same as another, freedom is valued as providing the opportunity for people to “live out” their humanity in their own way—so long as life itself (and the freedoms of others) is not (unnecessarily) at stake. In short,
18 Emile
Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, ed. Robert Bellah (London: The University of Chicago Press 1973) 46–7.
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the ultimate value assigned to life itself by the dominant ethic of “the West,” and in many other parts of the world, means that it is not surprising that Durkheim called it the “religion” of humanity. Neither is it surprising that so many today explicitly locate the sacred within the depths of this shared life. (Recall the key Kendal Project finding that 82 percent of questionnaire respondents agreed with the statement that “some sort of spirit or life force pervades all that lives.”) Whatever the precise role played by the “secular” ethic of humanity in explaining the growth of inner life spirituality, there is undoubtedly an extremely close match between the two. That they share the theme of there being a universal core to life, expressing or “manifesting” itself through the unique life experiences of particular individuals by way of the (relative) freedom which they are accorded, undoubtedly shows that the “secular” ethic has played an important role in providing assumptions for, and in lending plausibility to, the explicitly sacralized rendering of the ethic in contemporary spirituality of life circles today. Whereas the ethic of humanity is grounded in “life in general,” the development of the autonomous self is more about “life in particular”: the unique life of the experiences of each person. With the development of the autonomous self, subjective life—so vital an aspect of the self-understanding of the autonomous agent—becomes an increasing focus of attention and concern. Catering to subjective life, fuelling it, perhaps constituting particular elements, subjective wellbeing culture has thus become a vehicle for a range of careers, adding up to one of the largest (if not the largest) employment sectors of contemporary modernity. And the culture of subjective wellbeing has played a major role in the growth of inner life spirituality. All cultures are bound up with the wellbeing (or not) of their denizens. Subjective wellbeing culture is marked out by the explicit (often highly elaborated) attention that is paid to subjective life. One sees this, for example, in the difference between the car ad that provides the objective facts (fuel consumption, number of cylinders, etc.) and the one that declares “Experience the Difference” or “The Drive of Your Life,” with only a photograph. Clearly, you might be pleased about the fuel consumption figure—but the fact remains that the life of experience is not explicitly addressed in objective, impersonal provisions of this variety. Those working within subjective wellbeing culture seek to align their provisions and activities with the elementary “logic” of enhancing the quality of subjective life. Given that the subjective life of any particular individual is unique, provisions or activities are personalized or individualized as much as possible (or are left intentionally vague so as to be inclusive and open to personal interpretation). The key is to enable people to “be themselves” (where the unique comes in) “only better” (which is where the enhancement of quality comes in)—a two-fold aim which is frequently advanced by encouraging people to go “deeper” into their experiences to develop their qualities and circumvent their limitations (and for those who regard life as unfathomable, there is plenty of scope for 54
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going “deeper”). From child-centered or “independent” education, to manager-centered “soft capitalism,” to patient-centered nursing, to guest-centered spas and hotels, to the more individuated health and fitness clubs, to customer-centered shop floor assistants, to “person”-centered call center operatives, to viewer-centered “reality TV” shows, to reader-“engaging” or “life-provoking” autobiographies and women’s magazines, to advertising, to client-centered therapists, to life-skill coaches: Provisions and services offer a provisions and services offer a wide range of ways of being yourself only better. The child-centered primary school wide range of ways of being teacher works in the spirit of Rousseau to cultivate the paryourself only better. ticular abilities or “gifts” of individual children and to help particular children to develop their own “well-rounded” personalities; the therapist at the spa endeavors to work with her guest to facilitate the best possible experiences; those producing “reality TV” shows aim to provide as many opportunities as possible for the individual viewer to learn from the “personalities,” both how to avoid ill-being and how to be happy and successful as a person. What has all this got to do with the growth of New Age spiritualities of life? Within the ranks of those supplying the provisions of purchasing culture, any good market researcher will be aware of the inner life beliefs of the kind reported by Eileen Barker. Market researchers will know that the sales of newspapers (like the Daily Mail) or (women’s) magazines like O The Oprah Magazine benefit from the inclusion of articles catering to the hopes of those with beliefs of this variety; market researchers will know that “spiritual” products sold in health and beauty shops are likely to appeal to those who think that holistic spirituality might well improve their quality of life. And in turn, the widespread presence of spiritually “significant” provisions—not least the many books housed under the “self-improvement,” “health and fitness,” and (of course) the “mind-body-spirit” categories in the wellbeing zones of major bookstores—could well be serving to contribute to the increase in the number of people who believe in inner spirituality, perhaps even influencing the “I definitely believe in something” camp. “Capitalizing” on widespread beliefs in what lies within and what this realm has to offer, many of the provisions and activities of subjective wellbeing culture have introduced holistic, mind-body-spirit themes. Sometimes these are well-developed; sometimes they provide a “taste”; sometimes they take the form of allusions to inner life spirituality and hints of what it promises. Relative to context, inner life spirituality is thriving. It adds to the “better” or “more” of more secular forms of subjective wellbeing culture by offering an additional means to the end of the “more.” Working from within the heart of the person, to flow through her or his personal life, it does not distract from the unique—the “I am what I am” anchorage of so much of modern culture.19
19 Whether
or not people are “taken in” by the advertising (etc.) of much of subjective wellbeing is not my concern here. What matters is that they have the opportunity to be “taken in to” their subjectivities.
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The assumptions and values of subjective wellbeing culture—the importance of subjective life; the positive, “can do” way it is envisaged; the theme of exercising autonomy to develop, express, and celebrate who you really are—are writ large in the holistic milieu. Accordingly, expectations aroused by subjective wellbeing culture can serve to direct people to the specialized zone of the milieu itself. Here, they can engage in associational, face-to-face activities to go “deeper” into what is to be found in other areas of the culture. One reads about yoga and wellbeing in a popular magazine; one decides to “work out” whilst watching a yoga DVD; one gets interested, buys a book or two, and reads about chakras, energy flows, and what yoga has to do with the purpose of life; one gets older and starts thinking about one’s health and what one’s life is all about; one exercises one’s autonomy to find out what works best; one finally settles with a tai chi group; one “realizes” things about oneself that one had not known before. Or again: a primary school teacher feels that she should really do something to prepare for the upcoming Ofsted inspection; she introduces “stilling” sessions; she experiences the effects for herself and observes the results in the classroom; she decides to join a meditation group. Many of the participants of the holistic milieu work, or have worked, in person-centered, wellbeing professions—nursing, education, counseling, therapy, HRD, and so on. Many become active in the holistic milieu because they have been unable to fulfill their holistic, person-centered, subjective wellbeing concerns within the workplace. Take the National Health Service hospital nurses as an example: on the one hand, governmental policies direct them to respond to the “spiritual needs” of their patients; on the other, they are terribly busy working to comply with scientific and bureaucratic procedures. A number of nurses whom I interviewed were seriously interested in “growth” by way of working closely with others and with what holistic spirituality has to offer, but got so frustrated with the “iron cage” of the ward that they simply left or went part-time, to liberate themselves by becoming practitioners in the holistic milieu.20
20 For
more on the role played by subjective wellbeing culture, including wellbeing-oriented professions such as nursing, see Heelas and Woodhead. If space permitted, consideration could also be paid to other growth factors, including the roles played by increasing prosperity; the increase of enrollment in college and higher education; the self-reported efficacy of holistic activities in enhancing the quality of life; the ways in which “humanistic” spirituality provides a useful way of appealing to “the same” in the increasingly multicultural environment of many schools and hospitals (for example); the ways in which inner life spirituality lends itself to serving the interests of the managerial sector (in particular) of mainstream businesses; the decline of belief in “human” existence in heaven, meaning that increasing value is attached to living a fulfilling, experience-laden life in the here-and-now; the widespread loss, at least in Britain, of knowledge of Christian beliefs, opening up the “space” for spiritualities that, until recently, were widely regarded as deviant; the ways in which the “empiricism” of holistic spiritualities of life—the test of “what works in my experience”—suits the ethos of consumer culture pragmatism; the celebratory, celebrity factor; and, somewhat conversely, the ways in which the egalitarianism of inner life spirituality suits the democratic, anti-deferential ethos that is widely in evidence today.
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Conclusion The across-the-board claim—that both religion and “alternative spirituality” are in decline—is clearly wrong. A great deal of evidence might show that regular church attendance is falling in many countries (including the U.S.), but virtually all indices show that New Age spiritualities of life are growing, most especially the activities of the holistic milieu, activities and beliefs within mainstream institutions, and personal beliefs. Designed to explain decline, pluralization, and structural differentiation theories, for example, might well help explain why theistic beliefs among the general population are becoming less popular (the first theory) and why public institutions have generally lost most of the theistic significance that they might have had in the past (the second). But does secularization theory have anything to offer with regard to explaining the growth of holistic spiritualities of life? Since explanations of decline can hardly explain growth, the short answer to this ill-explored question is “no.”21 However, the longer answer is that certain sociocultural developments are associated with both decline and growth. Consider the process of pluralization. On the one hand, the increasing awareness of different religions probably contributes to loss of faith in tradition. (Why should one be right when they all claim to be true?) On the other, the same increase almost certainly contributes to the growth of humanistic, inner life spirituality (for example, to handle the problem of difference in multicultural public institutions, one finds the sacred within the common ground of humanity). Or consider the development of the autonomous self. In The Spiritual Revolution, Linda Woodhead and I argue that the subjectivization thesis serves to offer a particular explanation of growth, another for decline.22 Basically, the argument is that the “turn” to the autonomous self and its subjectivities—which Charles Taylor calls “the massive subjective turn of modern culture”—favors those forms of spirituality which resource one’s subjectivities and treats them as a fundamental source of significance, and undermines those forms of religion which do not.23 Experienced as the heart of life and flowing through the unique experiences that comprise personal life, holistic spirituality can appeal to the increasing number of free spirits in the culture—people who exercise their autonomy by trusting their own experience to find ways of “deepening,” thereby “elevating,” the quality of their subjective lives, their intimate relationships, their sense of fulfillment and authenticity—without sacrificing their uniqueness and sense
21 This is not to deny that secularization theorists have done a great deal to illuminate the nature of moder-
nity, thereby contributing to other explanations.
22 See
Heelas and Woodhead for further discussion.
23 Charles Taylor,
The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) 26.
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of authority. At the same time, however, the subjectivization thesis offers a particular explanation of decline. As the assumptions, beliefs, and values of the autonomous self oriented toward the subjective life become more widespread in Western cultures, there are progressively fewer traditionalists, conformists, or conservatives who are willing to remain with places of religious worship, let alone to start attending. And autonomous selves are unlikely to participate in forms of worship that require living by an order of things not of their own making, rather than by something from within their own (not dependent) life. Bearing on both growth and decline, the development of the autonomous self and the associated subjective turn of modernity provide a general explanation of change. The fact remains, though, that the particular ways in which growth and decline are explained are by no means the same. The adverse impact of the autonomous, unique, subjectively oriented mode of selfhood on theistic tradition is one thing; the positive impact on New Age spiritualities of life another. Secularization theory is not so much challenged as put in its place—a place where it serves to complement explanations of growth.
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In Search of Certainties: The Paradoxes of Religiosity in Societies of High Modernity Danièle Hervieu-Léger
T
he “rational disenchantment” characteristic of modern societies does not mark the end of religion. It has not caused the disappearance of the need to believe—far from it. This assertion—which nowadays would sound selfevident—formed the starting point, thirty years ago, of a theoretical revival in the sociology of religions. It paved the way for a major re-evaluation of the secularization process, a task still far from complete. One point has now been established, however: it has become clear that belief proliferates in proportion to the uncertainty caused by the pace of change in all areas of social life. But we also know that it sits less and less easily within the dogmatic frameworks offered by institutional religions. In societies that have adopted the autonomy of individuals as a principle, individuals create, in an increasingly independent manner, the small systems of belief that fit their own aspirations and experiences. I propose to review, in broad outline, a number of elements of “religious modernity,” deliberately choosing examples drawn from the European religious scene, which, as we know, is substantially different from that of the United States. The first thing that can be observed is the unpredictable diversity of these individual compositions of belief, which may include elements borrowed from a wide variety of symbolic resources. Today, individuals write their own little belief narratives using words and symbols that have “escaped” the constellations of meaning in which a given tradition had set them over the centuries. Regularly practicing French, Belgian, or Italian Catholics, actively integrated in a parish community, state their belief in reincarnation. Norwegian or Danish
Danièle Hervieu-Léger holds academic degrees in political science, law, and sociology. Professor (Directrice d’Études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), she was elected President of the EHESS in 2004. She is also Chief Editor of the Archives des Sciences Sociales de Religions. Among her sixteen books is Religion as a Chain of Memory (2000).
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Lutherans affiliated with their national church advocate, in accordance with spiritual ecology, a religion in harmony with nature, which they see as an all-encompassing whole where the human has a place but does not possess any particular privileges over any other living organism. Jews claim to find in Buddhist meditation the authentic meaning of their relationship to the Torah. Believers of all origins assert composite religious identities, in which are crystallized the successive and cumulated stages of their personal spiritual search. At the same time, the organized structure of the belief systems authenticated by religious institutions is weakening: surveys on the beliefs of French people show that the vast majority of those who state a commitment to Catholicism no longer associate a belief in sin with the idea of possible damnation. Belief in a paradise after death holds out, but it is out-distanced—among practicing Catholics—by belief in reincarnation. The concept of hell is in the process of disappearing. More surprisingly, it seems that essentials of Christological belief are held only feebly by believers who nevertheless proclaim themselves “Christians.” Endless examples could be cited of this dual tendency towards the individualization and subjectivization of beliefs, on the one hand, and deregulation of the organized systems of religious belief, on the other. Seen from this angle, religious modernity means the individualized dissemination of convictions and the collapse of the religious codes that organized shared certainties within believing communities.
To Each His “Own” Truth: The Primacy of Authenticity The direct effect of this expressive individualism in the spiritual and religious sphere is to call into question, in the eyes of the believers themselves, the institutions’ claim to bear witness to “the true faith.” Thus, during a national survey on the beliefs of Catholics and Protestants carried out in Switzerland, only 2 percent of people questioned agreed with the following statement: “All religions are respectable, but only mine is true.”1 This down-toning of religious orthodoxies massively affects the younger generations and is apparent increasingly early. A survey carried out in France in 1998 shows that 6 percent of the population questioned, and only 4 percent of 18- to 29year-olds, think that their religion is the only true one.2 This putting into perspective of the orthodoxies upheld by institutions is part of a deeper movement in which the governing systems of truth are being displaced. Legitimization of belief is moving from religious authorities, guarantors of the truth of belief, to individuals themselves, who are responsible for the authenticity of their own spiritual approach. What gives value to
1
Roland J. Campiche, et al., Croire en Suisse(s) (Lausanne et Genève: L’Age d’Homme, 1992).
2 Yves Lambert, “Un paysage religieux en profonde évolution,”
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994) 123–62.
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the believer’s search, not only in his own eyes but also in the eyes of those with whom he dialogues, and before whom he testifies, is his sincerity and his personal commitment. The endeavor to conform to truths formatted by religious authorities has become completely secondary. This trend is also confirmed by Wade Clark Roof ’s studies in the United States on the religiosity of baby-boomers.3 Religious authorities themselves are contributing to this movement, by giving greater weight to the quality of personal spiritual experiences than to the strict orthodoxy of statements of belief. This tendency to consider that, in spiritual and religious matters, there is no truth other than that which is personal, and personally appropriated to oneself, is not a characteristic only of “floating” spiritual seekers, whose search for belief now has few links, if any, with claims of belonging to a particular community. It is also active within the domain of institutional religions, profoundly calling into question the hierarchical structures through which they underpin their authority in the field of truth. Of course, one could demonstrate that these mechanisms for bringing the faith of believers into conformity have never, historically speaking, functioned in a pure and perfect manner. But the novelty here is the rejection in strictly spiritual terms (in the name of faith itself ) of an institutional means of authenticating religious truth, which for centuries had represented both the support for the unquestioned universal validity of the major religions and the basis for the denominational definitions that identify different churches.
An Increasingly Broad “Symbol Market” Does the increasingly “do-it-yourself ” nature of individual beliefs mean we have entered into an era of spiritual fragmentation and radical change in perspective on shared certainties? Things are not so simple. It is true that contemporary belief systems are cobbled together from the resources available and accessible within a vast market of symbols. But the extreme dissemination of the little narratives produced by the individualization of belief must not be mistaken for a completely chaotic shattering of beliefs. Individuals freely assemble their personal “belief solution,” but they do so using symbol resources whose availability remains confined within certain limits. The first of these are related to the cultural environment; the second to the access that each person has to these resources. Reuse of elements taken from different sources is, up to a point, guided by the way the social environment represents and interprets the different contributing traditions. Thus, French Buddhism, currently being reinvented with great success, is propagated by a series of clichés that derive—somewhat distantly from the historical Buddhist tradition—from the assumed (and somewhat arguable!) closeness of Buddhism to flexibility in moral matters and to conciliatory openness towards 3
Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); and Spiritual Marketplace: Babyboomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
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other traditions that appeal to the modern individual. Obviously it is within the social classes most directly affected by the issues pertaining to this modern culture of the individual that this Buddhism revisited finds its main field for expansion. Furthermore, in this game of individualized belief composition, individuals display varied do-it-yourself skills, corresponding to differentiated social aptitudes. A Furthermore, in this forty-year-old graduate from a renowned university who lives in central Berlin and spends one-third of his time on business game of individualized trips will not cobble ideas together in the same way as a thirtybelief composition, year-old woman just arrived from the Caribbean who works as a cleaner. It is impossible to grasp the social logic of spiriindividuals display varied tual do-it-yourself composition without taking into account do-it-yourself skills… both the social conditions of an individual’s access to symbol resources of unequal availability and the cultural conditions of the use of these resources. It is true that relaxation of institutional control over belief favors individualistic dispersion of beliefs. But one should not overlook the fact that this dispersion still falls within a mechanism of social and cultural restrictions, the resonance of which remains extremely important. However, there is no doubt that the pool of symbol resources upon which individuals today are liable to draw in order to make their little personal belief system is undergoing considerable expansion in all societies of high modernity. This is a consequence of the general increase of cultural awareness linked to schooling and the development of communication, to the professional and geographical mobility that brings individuals into contact with a diversified range of cultural worlds during the course of their lives, and so on. I wish to retain two elements whose combination sheds some light on the increasing eclecticism characteristic of the belief productions of individuals. The first is the weakening of the family structures of religious transmission, which used to link an individual at an early age to a legacy of symbolic possessions that he inherited and that it was his role to pass on, in his turn, to the next generation. One of the characteristics of the contemporary religious scene is that religious identities are no longer inherited, or at any rate are less and less so. This breakdown of transmission is the result of a sequence of events that fall within the historical process of secularization. The pace of social and economic change, geographical and job mobility, and cultural transformations has dissolved the structures of plausibility in which inherited religious identities were formed. Competition from the spheres of belief and the normative systems to which they correspond in a pluralist society has contributed on a large scale to weakening the prescriptive power of religious references transmitted within the family. More recently, the “imperative to pass on the faith” has itself undergone the backlash of an individualization of belief that places individual choice at the forefront in religious matters. It is considered self-evident by increasing numbers of people in our societies that each individual must choose for him- or herself the lineage of belief with which he or she identifies: the intervention of parents, even assuming it were legitimate, no longer plays more than a subsidiary role. 62
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Furthermore, at the same time as a weakening of cultural and symbolic footholds formerly guaranteed by the early integration of individuals into a given religious tradition (a situation commonly described in terms of the ebb or disappearance of “religious culture” among the younger generations), the ready availability, with no special access code, of multifarious symbol stocks has expanded quite phenomenally. The profusion of religious sites on the internet offers a perfect illustration of this great bazaar of meanings in which individuals move around and take what they want. Alongside this explosion of virtual religion, the proliferation of published matter on religious topics, television, films, and the mainstream press all contribute to putting at everyone’s disposal information that—however partial or superficial it may be—broadens the “known religious landscape” of individuals. Two out of three French teenagers born into Catholic families have never been to mass or Sunday school. But they will without a doubt have seen movies such as Little Buddha, Seven Years in Tibet, or Witness. They will have made contact, through the intermediary of films, with the world of Jewish festivals or Ramadan, or with the themes of New Age trends and spiritual ecology. And their first exposure to the Gospels might well have been a successful popular musical. They will thus have discovered, albeit in the most anecdotal and unreliable fashion, the existence of diverse cultural, religious, and spiritual worlds that would, of course, have been unknown to their grandparents. In Europe much is made of the dangers, perhaps even the impending “cultural catastrophe,” entailed by such a chaotic spraying around of references to traditions known only fragmentarily. The fact remains that individuals build their capacity for spiritual and religious composition from this kaleidoscope of disparate data, almost invariably dislocated from the symbolic syntax that made it readable. It is better to attempt to reason on the basis of this situation than to vainly regret the time when early religious or ideological socialization enabled long-lasting stabilization of compact identities, clearly distinguishable from one another and socially identifiable.
The Greater the Individualization of Belief, the Greater Its Degree of Homogenization Does this fragmentation of personal religious structures imply that it is becoming impossible, in our societies, to share common beliefs? Or, in other words, does it imply that religious belief no longer plays any part in the working out of common worlds that bind individuals together? Things are somewhat more complex. The rejection of institutional approval of belief and the broadening of the stock of references and symbols made available for use and reuse by individuals does not only signify the fragmentation of small systems of belief. At the same time, the liberalization of the symbol market gives room to a paradoxical tendency towards the standardization of these small narratives: a standardization that makes possible—in a context of general cultural globalization—their arrangement into networks on a worldwide scale. This proclivity for standardization is a very precise response to the mechanisms of a symbol economy increasingly in alignment with the general laws of the market. 63
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The economic logic of the standardization of products on offer for mass consumption has asserted itself, along with the liberalization of competition, in all areas of production, from the manufacture of goods to artistic production. It is also applicable in the field of symbol production. Although it is often a dubious procedure to resort to economic categories when examining religious phenomena, it is justifiable to make use of them here in a non-analogous manner. Standardization as a production procedure, in this area as in all others, is the direct consequence of the process of liberalization, itself made possible by the abolition of the institutional monopoly of truth. A good indicator of the logic of symbol production standardization in the Christian world can be found in charismatic Catholic territory, as well as in evangelical Protestant territory (especially Pentecostal), in the remarkable increase in adherence to a “minimum creed,” which can be summed up as follows: “God loves you, Jesus saves, and you can be healed.” Theological clarification of this “creed” is not required and its practical effectiveness is meant to be experienced personally by each believer. This “doctrinal reduction” is linked to the expansion within this movement of an emotional religiosity that explicitly preaches putting the intellectual mind on the back burner and promotes the value of emotional experience of the presence of the Spirit. This theological minimalism—which reduces the relation with transcendence to the mere emotional and personalized closeness experienced with the divine being—allows the efficient adaptation of the content of exhortation to the demands of modern individualism for self-fulfillment and personal realization. This “religiosity reduced to affect” is not, however, as is too often suggested, the recent product of an assumed “postmodernity.” It represents one of the culminations of the long process by which modernists have learned to think of themselves as beings endowed with an inner life and to think of their presence in the world no longer in a context of the order of things or of divine will, but rather of a search for happiness and wellbeing. Charles Taylor, in the broad panorama that he proposes of this process, traces it back to Saint Augustine and Descartes and follows it up right through to the present day.4 From the point of view of the history of spirituality, a major stage—after the Reformation and the radical assertion of religious individualism—can be identified in the great spiritual movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the invention of a “friendly God.” It must be noted, incidentally, that this emotional internalizing of the divine coincides chronologically with the relegation of the deists’ Great Clock-Maker to a distant heaven from which he refrains from intervening in the history of Men. But this spiritual dynamic obviously underwent new development with the coming of a “psychological modernity” (as Jean Baudrillard says5) and the highly contemporary reign of concern for the self. Faith as an operator of individual realization is (with various modulations)
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4
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Les sources du moi (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
5
Jean Baudrillard, “Modernité,” Encyclopædia Universalis, vol.11 (Paris: Encyclopædia Universalis, 1980).
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the central motif of modern religiosity. Frequent reference to the convergence of different individualized spiritual quests (following the pattern of “we are all saying and seeking the same thing,” “we are expressing the different aspects of a common truth in a variety of forms,” etc.) allows the idea of a “common core belief ” to be authenticated. But the content of this belief is thinning while at the same time being strengthened by the personal benefits that each individual is supposed to gain from it. This is the precise pivotal point of the standardization of spiritual goods as a production process and of the phenomenon of marginal differentiation, which represents its counterpart, as a consumer process. At the time when all the products on offer for consumption conform to a small number of common standard types, the individual consumer of these goods needs to be able to find in them the answer to individual expectations, recognized as such in their unshakeable distinctiveness. These dialectics, of the standardization of goods put into circulation and of the ultra-personalization of their forms of presentation to believers, is one of the major traits of the new spiritual currents unfurling inside and outside the main churches. This dual movement of standardization and personalization (present in all fields of consumption) here corresponds to a rational concept of privatizing access to symbol goods, which is being progressively substituted for a collective rationale, or a semi-collective one—which corresponds to the institutional and family transmission of religious identities.
The Greater the Homogenization of Belief, the Greater the Migration among Believers This homogenization of belief clearly encourages the migration of believers, who define and modulate spiritual courses that pay less and less heed to denominational and community boundaries. Such approaches bring the field of spirituality into contact with that of therapy, psychology, or personal and professional performance management. They depict a “pilgrim-like” form of religiosity, one that is willful, individual, and mobile; not, or only slightly, subject to norms; one that is modifiable and external to the routines governing the daily lives of the individuals concerned. Here we should stress the fluidity brought to these spiritual journeys by the standardization of supply, which enables seekers of meaning to find anew, in various forms, shared themes directly associated with typically modern individual requirements, especially regarding each individual’s right to satisfy his subjectivity. Two other factors encourage wider-ranging movements of believers beyond their community bases, or even away from their native religious soil. The first is the movement of religious innovation stemming from migration itself, and which in return reinforces the homogenization effect. Believers move around and borrow from the various banks of resources available, weaving their own tapestry of meanings along the way. At the same time, it is possible to group together these individual 65
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belief productions on the basis of the play of mutual authentication that occurs within peer networks, where individuals come to seek essential confirmation of their own productions of meaning. These conglomerates produce new syntheses of belief that, drawing on the various sources that nourish them, create new bridges between different religious worlds. These bridges are actually (thematic or practical) structures of transposition from one religious sphere to another, transpositions that, in turn, help to make believers more mobile. In this way, one can observe the appearance of “converters” that, by their very polysemy, make it possible to connect networks of meaning rooted in different religious traditions. In this context, one may emphasize the place held by the question of reincarnation—freely reinterpreted, in highly un-Buddhist terms—as the boon of another chance to lead a successful life and avoid the dead-ends and failures of one’s initial path. Another “topical converter” of the utmost importance is the idea of healing, which establishes communication between the traditional religious worlds (where healing connects with the prospect of salvation, which it both heralds and anticipates) and the modern rediscovery of the centrality of the body in the process of self-construction. But there are also “practical converters,” which make possible transpositions from one experiential context to another, and from one symbolic world to another: the spread of meditation techniques (calling upon a variety of different cultural and religious traditions) also constitutes a good reference point for analyzing these migration phenomena. The second factor triggering believer migrations is the mass development of communications that enable the worldwide exchanges through which believers obtain confirmation of their own syntheses of belief. The multiplication of religious sites on the internet and the lively activity of “discussion forums” on spiritual topics are, as has already been pointed out, the first sign of this. Exploration of the implications of this phenomena are only just beginning, not only from the standpoint of the standardization of means of expression defined by the “web” (communication styles, the conventions of “netiquette,” etc.), but also from the standpoint of the effects of abstraction and virtualization or the disembodying effect of the phenomenon on the relationship between individuals communicating by this means. This abstraction also furthers the homogenization of forms of religious expression, since it makes radically less remarkable a relationship of dialogue requiring, under the governing system of religious modernity, mutual authentication of belief.
The More Individual Believers Migrate, the Greater Their Need for “Community Niches”: The Paradox of Rejoining a Community The most striking paradox of this situation is this: the more beliefs circulate, the less they determine tangible affiliations and the more they further a desire for community liable to evolve into intensive forms of religious socialization. The extreme acceleration of the circulation of beliefs, in particular via the media, stretches the connection between belief and belonging almost to the breaking point. The belief choices of indi66
in search of certainties / hervieu - léger
viduals are more and more dissociated from the processes of socialization that ensure the introduction, however limited, of individuals into tangible groups. The bond that one chooses to preserve with some kind of spiritual family is now supported by no more than, one could almost say, minimal references, shared on a worldwide scale. One may call to mind the prodigious sales of Paulho Coelho’s books—translated into every language with millions of copies sold—or the media success of the Dalai Lama’s works. In these extreme conditions, this tendency towards global circulation of props to belief—which is both fragmented to the extreme and yet standardized, within networks more and more distended or even virtual—tends to submerge the exchanges between individuals that are necessary for the mutual authentication (and therefore a minimum of stabilization) of beliefs. The whole paradox of religious modernity lies in the fact There can be no subject that the extreme fluidity of beliefs, which bears witness to without the ability to “speak.” the emancipation of individuals from the tutelage of the great institutions of meaning, rarely provides the “minima And this ability implies of certainty” that they need in order to create their perthe confrontation with an sonal identities, as believers called upon to assume their autonomy in all areas. These same individuals claim the otherness… right to direct their spiritual course themselves and give precedence to the authenticity of this personal quest over any form of compulsory conformity to the “truths” of which religious institutions claim to be the guardians. But for all this they have not eradicated the need to dialogue with others and to testify to their experiences. In fact they continue to seek, by means of such communication, a “sharing of certainties,” which does not challenge the individualization of belief process—quite the contrary, in fact. In order to understand that this trend towards individualization does not in any way contradict the search for a community where one can declare one’s personal search, it must be remembered that the need for subjectivization cannot really be met just through personalized consumption of increasingly standardized symbol goods. For it has the more fundamental aim of making meaning of individual experience. It thus requires the construction of a narrative, an operation that is itself inseparable from an “ability to speak” that makes up the subject’s own identity. There can be no subject without the ability to “speak.” And this ability implies the confrontation with an otherness, outside of which no language—and hence no recognition—is possible. However, it is the action of recognition that, through interaction and dialogue, makes possible the grounding of meanings individually produced and their introduction into social life. In other words, there is no possible rendering of spiritual experience as a narrative unless the individual, at some point, meets another individual able to confirm it for him: “What has meaning for you also has meaning for me.” If this narration is performed according to a religious mode, it requires the existence of a means of authentication of belief, by which an individual’s subjective and objective connection to a particular lineage of belief can be constructed. Invoking the continuity of a lineage received 67
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
from the past, and qualified to set a course for the future, constitutes the structural axis of any “religious identity.” If, in the contemporary context of fluidity of belief, the paths of religious identification follow unpredictable and continually amendable courses, they nevertheless still come across as the construction of an imaginary positioning system of individuals within a symbolic genealogy. It is this construction that ensures the integration of successive and fragmented experiences of the present into a duration endowed with a meaning. And yet, what is happening today? The collapse, or at any rate the weakening, of the great institutional governing systems of truth leaves individuals, to some extent, at a loss. If truth is no longer imposed from outside, if the burden of conducting one’s own search for certainties comes back to each individual, then if he or she is to endure the psychological and social cost of the operation, he or she must have sufficient access to symbol resources, to cultural references, to circles of dialogue that enable him or her to operate and ground his or her personal composition of meaning more firmly through contact with others. If these means are denied him or her, efforts to obtain authentication of belief may then move towards other ways, far more structured, of joining religious communities in which the sense of security of a shared code of meaning may be found and vouched for collectively. A call to recreate a community of shared truth may thus arise, paradoxically, at the very breaking point of tangible socio-religious links. At this extreme limit, a need to define a “base-platform of certainty” may arise, within closed spaces where intense sharing of a common objective truth, vouched for by the word of a charismatic leader and/or the sense of fellowship of being among kindred spirits, may bring individuals together. Taken to this extreme, this idea of finding reassurance within a community may lead to a group closing in upon itself and falling back on “bunker values” or “refuge identities,” rendered as impermeable as possible to communication with the outside world. Individualization, which dissolves inherited cultural identities, then leads, as the other side of the coin, to the constitution, activation, and even invention of small community identities, which are compact, substantial, and compensatory. This paradox falls within the contemporary proliferation of “cults,” as well as the strengthening of traditionalist and fundamentalist trends within the great religious traditions. This dubious component of religious modernity is not only a subject “worth thinking about” for sociologists; it is also a crucial political issue for society as a whole, and a challenge for democracy.
68
Sellers or Buyers in Religious Markets? The Supply and Demand of Religion1 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
S
ince the September 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq, public interest in religious pluralism has grown tremendously, and the debate about secularization theory and its recent critiques have become increasingly relevant to contemporary concerns. The religious landscapes in both Europe and the U.S. are increasingly diverse in different ways, but the overall trend on both sides of the Atlantic is toward greater secularization and a multiplicity of different approaches to religion. This diversity reflects centuries-old differences among Protestant and Catholic churches, Orthodox Christians, and long-established Jewish groups, combined with growing multiculturalism from immigrant populations adhering to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other faiths, as well as those adhering to none. Many observers suggest that New Age spiritualities may also play a role, including the development of more individualized practices outside organized religion. Secular Western societies have experienced the influx of migrants and political refugees drawn from traditional cultures and developing societies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, which has highlighted contrasts over divergent religious values and beliefs. Some traditional
1
This essay is adapted from Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In May 2006 she begins a two-year term as the new Director of the Democratic Governance Group at the United Nations Development Program in New York. Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science and Program Director at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He helped found the Eurobarometer surveys and directs the World Values surveys. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department and the European Union.
69
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
political conflicts between religious communities have become more muted, notably among Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. At the same time, new forms of identity politics appear to have become more salient.2 We are seeing a landscape in Western societies that is becoming both more secular and more diverse. The idea of secularization has a long and distinguished history in the social sciences, with many seminal thinkers arguing that religiosity was declining throughout Western societies. The seminal social thinkers of the nineteenth century—Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud—all believed that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the advent of industrial society.3 They were far from alone; ever since the Age of the Enlightenment, leading figures in philosophy, anthropology, and psychology have postulated that theological superstitions, symbolic liturgical rituals, and sacred practices are the product of a past that will be outgrown in the modern era. The death of religion was the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century; indeed, it has been regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry, where secularization was ranked with bureaucratization, rationalization, and urbanization as the key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations. As C. Wright Mills summarized this process: Once the world was filled with the sacred—in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.4 During the last decade, however, this thesis of the slow and steady death of religion has come under growing criticism; secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history. Critics point to multiple indicators of religious health and vitality today, ranging from the continued popularity of churchgoing in the United States to the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, the growth in fundamentalist movements and religious parties in the Muslim world, the evangelical revival sweeping through Latin America, and the upsurge of ethno-religious conflict in international affairs.5 After reviewing these developments, Peter L. Berger, one of the foremost advocates of secularization during the 1960s, recanted his earlier claims:
70
2
Some examples are the assassination of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and the bombings by foreign or indigenous Muslim groups causing mass casualities in Madrid and London.
3
See Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 170–94; Alan Aldridge, Religion in the Contemporary World (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) chapter 4.
4
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) 32–3.
5
“Fundamentalist” is here used in a neutral way to refer to those with an absolute conviction in the fundamental principles of their faith, to the extent that they will not accept the validity of any other beliefs.
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
The world today, with some exceptions...is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled “secularization theory” is essentially mistaken.6 In a fierce critique, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke suggest it is time to bury the secularization thesis: “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace.’”7 Were Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx completely misled in their beliefs about religious decline in industrialized societies? Was the predominant sociological view during the twentieth century totally misguided? Has the debate been settled? We think not. Talk of burying the secularization theory is premature. The critique relies too heavily on selected anomalies and focuses too heavily on the United States (which happens to be a striking deviant case) rather than comparing systematic evidence across a broad range of rich and poor societies.8 We need to move beyond studies of Catholic and Protestant church attendance in Europe (where attendance is falling) and the United States (where attendance remains stable) if we are to understand broader trends in religious vitality in churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and temples around the globe. There is no question that the traditional secularization thesis needs updating. This study develops a revised version of secularization theory that emphasizes the extent to which people have a sense of existential security—that is, the feeling that survival is secure enough that it can be taken for granted. We build on key elements of traditional sociological accounts while revising others. We believe that the importance of religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer nations, facing personal survival-threatening risks. We argue that feelings of vulnerability to physical, societal, and personal risks are a key factor driving religiosity, and we demonstrate that the process of secularization—a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs—has occurred most clearly among the most prosperous social sectors living in affluent and secure post-industrial nations.
6
See Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999) 2. Compare this statement with the arguments in Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967).
7
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 79.
8
For example, Roger Finke claims that “the vibrancy and growth of American religious institutions presents the most open defiance of the secularization model” (Finke, “An Unsecular America,” in Bruce 148).
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T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
Secularization is a tendency, not an iron law. One can easily think of striking exceptions, such as Osama bin Laden who is (or was) extremely rich and fanatically religious. But when we go beyond anecdotal evidence, we find that the overwhelming bulk of evidence points in the opposite direction: people who experience ego-tropic risks during their formative years (posing direct threats to themselves and their families) or sociotropic risks (threatening their community) tend to be far more religious than those who grow up under safer, more comfortable, and more predictable conditions. In relatively secure societies, the remnants of religion have not died away, but the importance and vitality of religion, its ever-present influence on how people live their daily lives, has gradually eroded. The strongest challenge to secularization theory arises from American observers who commonly point out that claims of steadily diminishing congregations in Western Europe are sharply at odds with U.S. trends, at least until the early 1990s.9 Here we focus upon how we can best explain “American exceptionalism.” 10 We first describe systematic and consistent evidence establishing the variations in religiosity among postindustrial nations, in particular contrasts between the U.S. and Western Europe. We focus on similar post-industrial nations, all affluent countries and established democracies, most (but not all) sharing a cultural heritage of Christendom (although the critical cleavage dividing Catholic and Protestant Europe remains), and all being service-sector knowledge economies with broadly similar levels of education and affluence.11 This “most-similar” comparative framework narrows down, or even eliminates, some of the multiple factors that could be causing variations in religious behavior, allowing us to compare like with like. We examine whether the United States is indeed “exceptional” among rich nations in the vitality of its spiritual life, as the conventional wisdom has long suggested, or whether, as Berger proposes, Western Europe is “exceptional” in its secularization.12 On this basis, we then consider systematic evidence to test alternative “supply” and “demand” explanations of variations in religiosity. Religious market theory postulates that intense competition between rival denominations (supply) generates a ferment of activity, explaining the vitality of churchgoing. We compare evidence supporting this account with the theory of secure secularization, based on the idea that societal modernization, human development, and economic inequality drive the popular
9
Berger, Desecularization; Andrew M. Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003).
10 Further
discussion of our larger project can be found in Norris and Inglehart.
11 Post-industrial
nation-states are defined as those assigned a Human Development Index score over .900 by the UN Development Report. These countries have a mean per capita GDP of $29,585.
12 Berger,
Desecularization. See also discussions of American cultural exceptionalism in Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955); Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of Canada and the United States (New York: Routledge, 1990); Graham K. Wilson, Only in America? The Politics of the United States in Comparative Perspective (Chatham: Chatham Publishers, 1998).
72
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
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'SFRVFODZPGQSBZFS Figure 1. Religious behavior in post-industrial societies. Mean frequency of attendance at religious services per society is based on responses to the question “Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days? More than once a week (7), once a week (6), once a month (5), only on special holidays (4), once a year (3), less often (2), never or practically never (1).” Mean frequency of prayer is based on “How often do you pray to God outside of religious services? Every day (7), more than once a week (6), once a week (5), at least once a month (4), several times a year (3), less often (2), never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001.)
demand for religion. The conclusions consider the broader implications of the findings for the role of faith in politics, and for divisions in the predominant cultures found in Europe and the United States.
Comparing Religiosity in Post-Industrial Nations We can start by considering the cross-national evidence for how the indicators of religiosity apply to post-industrial nations. Figure 1 shows the basic pattern of religious behavior, highlighting substantial contrasts between the cluster of countries that prove by far the most religious in this comparison, including the United States, Ireland, and Italy. At the other extreme, the most secular nations include France, Denmark, and Britain. There is a fairly similar pattern across both indicators of religious behavior, suggesting that both collective and individual forms of participation are fairly consistent in each society. Therefore, although religion in the United States is distinctive among rich nations, it would still be misleading to refer to American “exceptionalism” (as so many do), as though it were a deviant case from all other post-industrial nations. 73
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
*DFMBOE
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Figure 2. Religious participation in Europe. Mean frequency of attendance at religious services is based on responses to the question “Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days? More than once a week (7), once a week (6), once a month (5), only on special holidays (4), once a year (3), less often (2), never or practically never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001.)
The marked contrasts within Europe are illustrated further in Figure 2, mapping secular Northern Europe compared with the persistence of more regular churchgoing habits in Southern Europe, as well as differences within Central and Eastern Europe. The “North-South” religious gap within the European Union is, admittedly, a puzzle that cannot be explained by the process of societal development alone, since these are all rich nations. More plausible explanations include the contemporary strength of religiosity in Protestant and Catholic cultures, as well as societal differences in economic equality.
74
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
Trends in Secularization in Western Europe One reason for these cross-national variations could be that most post-industrial societies have experienced a significant erosion of religiosity during the post-war era, but that these trends have occurred from different starting points, in a path-dependent fashion, due to the historic legacy of the religious institutions and cultures within each country. Where the church is today could depend in large part upon where it started out. Evidence in Western Europe consistently and unequivocally shows two things: traditional religious beliefs and involvement in institutionalized religion, first, vary considerably from one country to another; and, second, have steadily declined throughout Western Europe, particularly since the 1960s. Studies have often reported that many Western Europeans have ceased to be regular churchgoers today outside of special occasions such as Christmas and Easter, weddings and funerals, a pattern especially evident among the young. Jagodzinski and Dobbelaere, for example, compared the proportion of regular (weekly) churchgoers in seven European countries from 1970 to 1991, based on the Eurobarometer surveys, and documented a dramatic decrease in congregations during this period in the states under comparison. Overall levels of church disengagement had advanced furthest in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. “Although the timing and pace differ from one country to the next,” the authors concluded, “the general tendency is quite stable: in the long run, the percentage of unaffiliated is increasing.”13 Numerous studies provide a wealth of evidence confirming similar patterns of declining religiosity found in many other post-industrial nations.14 Trends in recent decades illustrate the consistency of the secularization process irrespective of the particular indicator or survey that is selected. Figure 3 illustrates the erosion of regular church attendance that has occurred throughout Western Europe since the early 1970s. The fall is steepest and most significant in many Catholic societies, notably Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain. To conclude, as Greeley does, that religion is “still relatively unchanged” in the traditional Catholic nations of Europe seems a triumph of hope over experience, and sharply
13 Wolfgang
Jagodzinski and Karel Dobbelaere, “Secularization and Church Religiosity,” The Impact of Values, ed. Jan W. van Deth and Elinor Scarbrough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 105.
14 R.
Currie, A. D. Gilbert, and L. Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Sabino Samele Acquaviva, The Decline of the Sacred in Industrial Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979); Sheena Ashford and Noel Timms, What Europe Thinks: A Study of Western European Values (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1992); Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); F. Höllinger, Volksreligion und Herrschaftskirche. Die Würzeln Religiösen Verhaltens in Westlichen Gesellschaften (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1996); L. Voye, “Secularization in a Context of Advanced Modernity,” Sociology of Religion 60.3 (1999): 275–88; Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) chapter 3. For a challenge to this view, however, see Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, “A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (1985): 230–52.
75
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
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Figure 3. Religious participation in Western Europe, 1970–2000. Graphs represent percentage of the population in each society who said they attended a religious service “at least once a week” and the regression line of the trend. (The Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File 1970–99.)
at odds with the evidence.15 Marked contrasts in the strength of churchgoing habits remain clear, as between contemporary rates of religious participation in Ireland and Denmark. Nevertheless, all the trends point consistently downward. Moreover, the erosion of religiosity is not exclusive to Western European nations; regular churchgoing also dropped during the last two decades in affluent Anglo-American nations such as Canada and Australia.16
15 Greeley
xi.
16 See Reginald W. Bibby, “The State of Collective Religiosity in Canada: An Empirical Analysis,” Canadian
Review of Sociology and Anthropology 16.1 (1979): table 3, which shows that in Canada church attendance fell from 67 percent in 1946 to 35 percent in 1978; Hans Mol, The Faith of Australians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985); Ian McAllister, “Religious Change and Secularization: The Transmission of Religious Values in Australia,” Sociological Analysis 49.3 (1998): 249–63.
76
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
Table 1. Belief in God, 1947–2001 Nation
1947a
1968b
Sweden
80
Netherlands
80
Australia
95
Norway
84
Denmark
80
1975c
1981d
1990d
1995d
2001d
Changee
βf
Sig.g
60
52
38
48
46
-33.6
-.675
**
79
64
61
58
-22.0
-.463
*
75
-19.9
-.379
**
-18.9
-.473
**
80 73
Britain
77
Greece
96
W. Germany
81
Belgium Finland
83
83
France
66
73
Canada
95
76
79 68
58
53
59
62
-17.9
-.387
*
73
72
61
-16.5
-.461
*
84
-12.3
-.364
69
-12.0
-.305
n/s
67
-11.2
-.487
n/s
72
-10.8
-.296
n/s
72
68
63
78
76
65 61
56
-10.1
-.263
n/s
89
91
85
88
-7.2
-.387
n/s
Japan
38
39
85
U.S.
94
Brazil
96
98
73
57
98
Italy
71
59
India Austria
65
72
84
Switzerland
75
77
77
-7.2
-.277
n/s
93
94
-4.0
-.231
n/s
37
44
35
-3.0
-.016
n/s
78
83
-1.9
-.097
n/s
88
-0.1
.039
n/s
94
0.4
-.027
n/s
3.0
.056
n/s
88
82
82
94
96
93
94
98
99
Source: Gallup polls from Lee Sigelman, “Review of the Polls: Multination Surveys of Religious Beliefs,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 16.3 (1977): 289–94. Note: Figures indicate the percentage of the public who express belief in God. a Gallup Opinion Index “Do you, personally, believe in God?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. b Gallup Opinion Index “Do you believe in God?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. c Gallup Opinion Index “Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. d World Values Survey/European Values Survey “Do you believe in God?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. e The difference between the first and the last observation in the series. In the OLS regression models, year is regressed on the series. f The unstandardized β summarizes the slope of the line. g The statistical significance of the change in the time-series. N/s = not significant, *p<.05, and **p<.01 (2-tailed).
One interpretation of these patterns is offered by those who emphasize that trends in churchgoing are interesting but also out of date, if religiosity has evolved and reinvented itself today as diverse forms of personal “spirituality.” Observers such as Wade Clark Roof, Robert Fuller, Grace Davie, and Danièle Hervieu-Léger suggest that the declining status and authority of traditional church institutions and clergy, the individualization of the quest for spirituality, and the rise of multiple “New Age” movements concerned with “lived religion” result in public engagement with churches being replaced by a 77
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
“private” or “personal” search for spirituality and meaning in life, making the practices, beliefs, and symbols of religiosity less visible.17 Others, such as Greeley, propose that indicators of subjective beliefs in Europe, exemplified by faith in God or in life after death, display a mixed picture during the last two decades, rather than a simple uniform decline: In some countries, religion has increased (most notably the former communist countries and especially Russia) in others it has declined (most notably Britain, the Netherlands, and France) and in still other countries it is relatively unchanged (the traditional Catholic countries), and in yet other countries (some of the social democratic countries) it has both declined and increased.18 Given such divergence, Greeley suggests that simple attempts to discover secularization should be abandoned, and instead attention should focus on explaining persistent and well-established cross-national patterns—for example, why people in Ireland and Italy are consistently more religious than those in France and Sweden. Yet we find that, far from divergent patterns, one reason for the decline in religious participation during the late twentieth century lies in the fact that during these years many common spiritual beliefs have indeed suffered considerable erosion in post-industrial societies. There is, in fact, a consistent link between the “public” and “private” dimensions of religiosity. We monitor trends in religious beliefs in God and in life after death during the last fifty years by matching survey data in the Gallup polls starting in 1947 to the more recent data where the same questions were replicated in the World Values surveys. Table 1 shows that in 1947, roughly eight out of ten people believed in God, with the highest levels of belief expressed in Australia, Canada, the U.S., and Brazil. A fall in faith in God occurred across all but two nations (the U.S. and Brazil). The decline proved sharpest in the Scandinavian nations, the Netherlands, Australia, and Britain. Table 2 illustrates very similar patterns for belief in life after death, where again an erosion of subjective religiosity occurs in thirteen of the seventeen countries where evidence is available. The greatest falls during the last fifty years are registered in Northern Europe, Canada, and Brazil, and the only exceptions to this pattern, where there is a revival of religious faith, are in the United States, Japan, and Italy.
17 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Wade
Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “The Case for a Sociology of ‘Multiple Religious Modernities’: A Different Approach to the ‘Invisible Religion’ of European Societies,” Social Compass 50.3 (2003): 287–95.
18 Greeley
78
xi.
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
Table 2. Belief in life after death, 1947–2001 Nation
1947a
1961a
1968a
Norway
71
71
54
Finland
69
Denmark
55
Netherlands
68
France
58
Canada
78
Brazil
78
Sweden
49
1975a
1981b
1990b
1995b
41
36
43
44
50
55 63
50 35
68
Australia
63
Britain
49
-28 44
-25
25
29
32
-23
41
39
47
-22
35
38
39
-20
54
61
61
67
-11
28
70
67
31
40
57
Belgium
Changec
39
38
Greece
2001b
48
36
48
49
43
46
56
38
Switzerland
55
50
W. Germany
38
41
33
74
73
37
-11 39
-10
47
-10
40
-8
56 44
-7 45
-4
52
52
36
38
50
38
0
69
70
70
73
76
8
Japan
18
33
30
33
32
14
Italy
46
46
53
61
15
U.S.
68
-3
Source: Gallup polls from Lee Sigelman, “Review of the Polls: Multination Surveys of Religious Beliefs,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 16.3 (1977): 289–94. Note: Figures indicate the percentage of the public who express belief in life after death. a Gallup Opinion Index “Do you believe in life after death?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. b World Values Survey/European Values Survey “Do you believe in life after death?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. c The difference between the first and the last observation in the series.
Trends in Religiosity in the United States In light of these European patterns, many have regarded the United States as an outlier, although in fact the evidence remains somewhat ambiguous. At least until the late 1980s, analysis of trends in church attendance derived from historical records and from representative surveys commonly reported that the size of congregations in the United States had remained stable over decades. Studies published during the 1980s indicated that Protestant church attendance had not declined significantly in the U.S., and, while it fell rapidly among Catholics from 1968 to 1975, it did not erode further in subsequent years.19 Gallup found that in March 1939, 40 percent of American
19 Andrew
M. Greeley, Religious Change in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Andrew M. Greeley, Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion (New York: Schocken, 1985); M. Hout and Andrew M. Greeley, “The Center Doesn’t Hold: Church Attendance in the United States, 1940– 1984,” American Sociological Review 52.3 (1987): 325–45.
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adults reported attending church the previous week—roughly the same figure given by Gallup more than sixty years later (in March 2003).20 The U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), conducted annually by NORC during the last three decades, also indicates that weekly church attendance in the U.S. hovers around 25–30 percent, with a significant fall in church attendance occurring during the last decade. According to the GSS, the proportion of Americans reporting that they attended church at least weekly fell to one-quarter in the most recent estimate, while at the same time the proportion saying that they never attended church doubled to one-fifth of all Americans (see Figure 4).21 Other indicators also suggest that traditional religious participation may have eroded in the United States, parallel to the long-term trends experienced throughout Europe. For example, Gallup polls registered a modest decline in the proportion of Americans who are members of a church or synagogue, down from about three-quarters (73 percent) of the population in 1937 to about two-thirds (65 percent) in 2001. The GSS monitored religious identities annually during the last three decades and found that the proportion of Americans who are secularists, reporting that they have no religious preference or identity, climbed steadily during the 1990s (see Figure 5). During this decade, the main erosion occurred among American Protestants, while the proportion of Catholics in the population remained fairly steady, in part fuelled by a substantial influx of Hispanic immigrants with large families. At the same time, changes have occurred among denominations within the religious population in the United States; many studies report that congregations for newer evangelical churches have expanded their membership at the expense of “mainline” Protestant denominations such as the United Methodist Church, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, in part due to changes in the American population and also patterns of immigration from Latin America and Asia.22 Moreover, Brian Wilson emphasizes that, even where we have reliable estimates 20 March 1939 Gallup Poll—A.I.P.O. “Did you happen to go to church last Sunday?” 40 percent answered yes,
60 percent no. March 14, 2003, Gallup—C.N.N./U.S.A. Today Poll. “How often do you attend church or synagogue—at least once a week [31 percent], almost every week [9 percent], about once a month [16 percent], seldom [28 percent], or never [16 percent]?” Self-reported church attendance figures may well contain systematic bias towards over-reporting (C. Kirk Hadaway and P. L. Marler, “Did You Really Go To Church This Week? Behind the Poll Data,” Christian Century [6 May 1998]: 472–5; C. Kirk Hadaway, et al., “What the Polls Don’t Show: A Closer Look at Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 58.6 [1993]: 741–52). Yet this cannot explain the apparent discrepancy between reported churchgoing in the U.S. and Western Europe, unless some “spiral of silence” claims about the social acceptability of churchgoing in the U.S. are brought in. Other evidence based on cohort and period analysis of the GSS suggests that the apparent long-term stability of the aggregate levels of churchgoing in the U.S. in fact disguises two simultaneous changes occurring since the early 1970s: a negative cohort effect and a positive period effect. See Mark Chaves, “Secularization and Religious Revival: Evidence from U.S. Church Attendance Rates, 1972–1986,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28.4 (1989): 464–77.
21 See
Hadaway, et al.
22 Robert
Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Tom Smith, “Are Conservative Churches Really Growing?” Review of Religious Research 33 (1992): 305– 29; Michael Hout, Andrew M. Greeley, and Melissa J. Wilde, “The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 107.2 (2001): 468–500.
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S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
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Figure 4. Religious participation in the U.S., 1972–2002. Lines represent responses to the question “How often do you attend religious services?” (U.S. General Social Survey 1972–2002.)
of churchgoing, little relationship may exist between these practices and spirituality— churchgoing may fulfill a need for social networking within local communities, or churches may have become more secular in orientation.23 Despite the overall popularity of religion in the United States, it would also be a gross exaggeration to claim that all Americans feel the same way, as important social and regional disparities exist. Secularists, for example, are far more likely to live in urban cities on the Pacific coast or in the Northeast, as well as to have a college degree, and to be single and male. By contrast, committed evangelicals are far more likely to live in small towns or rural areas, especially in the South and Midwest, as well as be female and married. These regional divisions proved important for politics: in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, religion was by far the strongest predictor of who voted for George W. Bush and who voted for Al Gore.24 The election result reflected strongly entrenched
23 Brian
R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
24 Pippa
Norris, “U.S. Campaign 2000: Of Pregnant Chads, Butterfly Ballots and Partisan Vitriol,” Government and Opposition 36.1 (2001): 3–26; VNS Exit Polls in “Who Voted,” The New York Times (12 November 2000); Andrew Kohut, John C. Green, Scott Keeter, and Robert C. Toth, The Diminishing Divide: Religion’s Changing Role in American Politics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000).
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Figure 5. Religious identities in the U.S., 1972–2002. Lines represent responses to the question “What is your religious preference? Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” The graph excludes religious identities adhered to by less than 3 percent of Americans. (U.S. General Social Survey 1972–2002.)
divisions in public opinion and values between social conservatives and liberals on issues such as the death penalty, reproductive rights, and homosexuality. The regional patterns of religiosity are important and may even have led to two distinctive cultures within the United States; Himmelfarb argues that one culture in the U.S. is religious, puritanical, family-centered, patriotic, and conformist, and the other is secular, tolerant, hedonistic, and multicultural. These cultures coexist and tolerate each other, in part because they inhabit different worlds.25 The United States remains one of the most religious in the club of rich countries, alongside Ireland and Italy, and this makes the U.S. one of the most religious countries in the world. The pervasive importance of these values is apparent in many American practices, especially in public life (even prior to the Bush administration and 9/11), despite the strict division of church and state. In the same way, American cultural values are more individualistic, more patriotic, more moralistic, and more culturally conservative than Europe. Nevertheless, there are some indicators that secular tendencies may have strengthened in the U.S., at least during the last decade, which may bring the United States slightly closer to Western Europe.
25 Gertrude
82
Himmelfarb, One Nation: Two Cultures (New York: Random House, 1999).
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
Explaining Variations in Religiosity: The Religious Market Model Given the existence of important and consistent cross-national variations in religiosity, what best explains these patterns? Religious Markets Religious market theory provides the most critical and sustained challenge to the traditional secularization thesis. This account suggests that supply-side factors, notably denominational competition and state regulation of religious institutions, shape levels of religious participation in the United States and Europe. During the last decade many American commentators have enthusiastically advanced this account, and the principle proponents include Roger Finke, Rodney Stark, Lawrence R. Iannaccone, William Sims Bainbridge, and R. Stephen Warner, although the theory has also encountered sustained criticism. Market-based theories in the sociology of religion assume that the demand for religious products is relatively constant, based on the otherworldly rewards of life after death promised by most (although not all) faiths.26 Dissimilar levels of spiritual behavior evident in various countries are believed to result less from “bottom up” demand than from variance in “top down” religious supply. Religious groups compete for congregations with different degrees of vigor. Established churches are thought to be complacent monopolies taking their congregations for granted, with a fixed market share due to state regulation and subsidy for one particular faith that enjoys special status and privileges. By contrast, where a free religious marketplace exists, energetic competition between churches expands the supply of religious “products,” thereby mobilizing religious activism among the public. The theory claims to be a universal generalization applicable to all faiths, although the evidence to support this argument is drawn largely from the U.S. and Western Europe. The proliferation of diverse churches in the U.S. is believed to have maximized choice and competition among faiths, thereby mobilizing the American public. American churches are subject to market forces, and depend upon their ability to attract clergy and volunteers as well as the financial resources that flow from their membership. Competition is thought to generate certain benefits, producing diversity, stimulating innovation, and compelling recruitment by congregations. For example, the National Congregations Study found that American churches commonly seek to attract new adherents by offering multiple social activities (or “products”) beyond services of worship, including religious education, cultural and arts groups, engagement in community politics, and welfare services such as soup kitchens and babysitting cooperatives.27 By contrast, Stark and Finke emphasize that most European nations sustain what they
26 Stark
and Finke, Acts of Faith, 88.
27 Mark Chaves, “The National Congregations Study: Background, Methods and Selected Results,” Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion 38.4 (1999): 458–76.
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term “a socialized religious economy,” with state subsidies for established churches.28 Religious monopolies are believed to be less innovative, responsive, and efficient. Where clergy enjoy secure incomes and tenure regardless of their performance, such as in Germany and Sweden, it is thought that priests will grow complacent, slothful, and lax. Stark and Finke believe that if the “supply” of churches was expanded in Europe through disestablishment (deregulation), and if churches just made more effort, this would probably lead to a resurgence of religious behavior among the public. In short, they conclude, “To the extent that organizations work harder, they are more successful. What could be more obvious?”29 What indeed? Leaving aside the strong normative thrust of the supply-side argument and concepts, derived from free market economics, what specific propositions flow from this account that are open to systematic cross-national testing with empirical evidence? We can compare four separate indicators to test the religious market model (see Table 3). Any one indicator may be flawed, due to the limitations of data or measurement error, but if all results from the independent measures point in a generally consistent direction then this lends greater confidence to the results. Religious Pluralism If the supply-side theory is correct, then religious pluralism and state regulation of religion should both be important in predicting rates of churchgoing in post-industrial societies: in particular, countries with great competition among multiple pluralist religious churches, denominations, and faiths should have the highest religious participation. Supply-side theorists use the Herfindahl index as the standard measure to gauge religious pluralism.30 One important qualification, however, concerns the unit of comparison: since this study measures religious pluralism among the major world faiths at the societal level, which is necessary for cross-national research, it cannot gauge competition among religious organizations representing diverse denominations and sects at local or regional levels. Contrary to the predictions of supply-side theory, the correlation between religious pluralism and religious behavior all prove insignificant in post-industrial societies, with the distribution illustrated in Figure 6. The results lend no support to the claim of a significant link between religious pluralism and participation, and this is true irrespective of whether the comparison focuses on frequency of attendance at services of worship or the fre-
28 Stark
and Finke, Acts of Faith, 228.
29 Stark
and Finke, Acts of Faith, 257.
30 Data
on the major religious populations is derived from the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year 2001, as compiled by Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William Easterly, Sergio Kurlat, and Romain Wacziarg, “Fractionalization,” Journal of Economic Growth 82 (2003): 219–58. The data set is available at <www.stanford.edu/~wacziarg/papersum.html>.
84
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quency of prayer.31 Among post-industrial societies, the United States is the exception in its combination of high rates of religious pluralism and participation: the theory does indeed fit the American case, but the problem is that it fails to work elsewhere. The scatter gram shows that other English-speaking nations share similar levels of religious pluralism; however, in these countries far fewer people regularly attend church. Moreover, in Catholic post-industrial societies the relationship is actually reversed, with the highest participation evident in Ireland and Italy where the Church enjoys a virtual religious monopoly, compared with the more pluralist Netherlands and France, where churchgoing habits are far weaker. Nor is this merely due to the comparison of post-industrial societies: the global comparison in all nations confirms that there is no significant relationship between participation and pluralism across the broader distribution of societies worldwide. Of course the account could always be retrieved by arguing that what matters is less competition among the major faiths, since people rarely convert directly, but rather competition among or within specific denominations, since people are more likely to switch particular churches within closely related families. This proposition would require testing at the community level with other forms of data, at a finer level of denominational detail than is available in most social surveys, and indeed even in most census data. Nevertheless, if the claims of the original theory were modified, this would greatly limit its applicability for cross-national research. Irrespective of the extensive literature advocating the supply-side theory, based on the measure of pluralism of faiths and religious participation used in this study, no empirical support is found here for this account. State Regulation and Freedom of Religion An alternative version of religious market theory predicts that participation will also be maximized where there is a strong constitutional division between church and state, protecting religious freedom of worship and toleration of different denominations, without hindrance to particular sects and faiths. This is one of the explanations for American exceptionalism advanced by Lipset, who argues that the long-standing separation of church and state in the United States has given the churches greater autonomy and allowed varied opportunities for people to participate in religion.32 Three indicators are available to analyze this relationship. First, the state regulation of religion was measured by Mark Chaves and David E. Cann in eighteen post-industrial
31 It
should be noted that the proportion of adherents to the majority religion in each country was also compared as an alternative measure of religious diversity or homogeneity, but this measure also proved an insignificant predictor of religious participation, whether the comparison was restricted to post-industrial societies or to all nations worldwide.
32 Lipset.
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3FMJHJPVTQMVSBMJTN Figure 6. Religiosity and pluralism. Mean religious participation is based on responses to the question “Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days? More than once a week (7), once a week (6), once a month (5), only on special holidays (4), once a year (3), less often (2), never or practically never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001.) Religious pluralism is based on Herfindahl Index. (Alesina et al. 2002.)
nations.33 Second, these results were cross-checked against the Norris and Inglehart Freedom of Religion Index.34 Third, comparisons can then be made with the summary analysis of religious freedom generated every year by Freedom House, which measures the freedom of houses of worship, humanitarian organizations, educational institutions; the freedom for individual religious practices such as prayer, worship, and dress;
33 The
6-point scale was classified by Chaves and Cann using data provided by the World Christian Encyclopedia (1982) based on whether or not each country had the following characteristics: 1) there is a single, officially designated state church; 2) there is official state recognition of some denominations but not others; 3) the state appoints or approves the appointment of church leaders; 4) the state directly pays church personnel salaries; 5) there is a system of ecclesiastical tax collection; 6) the state directly subsidizes, beyond mere tax breaks, the operation, maintenance, or capital expenses for churches. See Mark Chaves and David E. Cann, “Regulation, Pluralism and Religious Market Structure,” Rationality and Society 4 (1992): 272–90. The scale is reversed in this study, for ease of presentation, so that a low score represents greater regulation.
34 See
Norris and Inglehart. The 20-item scale was constructed by coding 20 indicators, such as the role of the state in subsidizing churches, constitutional recognition of freedom of religion, and restrictions of certain denominations, cults, or sects. It was then standardized to 100 points, for ease of interpretation, and coded so that a higher score represented greater religious freedom.
86
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
and human rights in general, where they involve particular religious bodies, individuals, and activities.35 Contrary to the supply-side theory, however, the results of the simple correlations of these three indicators (see Table 3) suggest that no significant relationship exists between any of these indicators of religious freedom and levels of religious behavior. Moreover, this pattern was found both within the comparison of post-industrial nations and also in the global comparison of all countries where data was available. There are many reasons why one might imagine that the spread of greater tolerance and freedom of worship, facilitating competition among religious institutions, might prove conducive to greater religious activity among the public. But so far the range of evidence using multiple indicators fails to support the supply-side claims. The Role of Security and Economic Inequality in Generating Demand Supply-side religious market theory has therefore provided only limited insights into the diversity of religious participation found in rich nations. In post-industrial nations, no empirical support that we examined could explain the puzzle of why some rich nations are far more religious than others or establish a significant link between patterns of religious behavior and the indicators of religious pluralism, religious freedom, and the perceived functions of the church. But, of course, this still leaves us with the question that we considered at the start of the paper: why are some societies such as the United States and Ireland persistently more religious in their habits and beliefs than comparable Western nations sharing a Christian cultural heritage? Our answer rests on patterns of human security and, in particular, conditions of socioeconomic inequality. What matters for the societal vulnerability, insecurity, and risk that we believe drives religiosity are not simply levels of national economic resources but their distribution as well. The growth of the welfare state in industrialized nations insures large sectors of the public against the worst risks of ill health and old age, penury and destitution, while private insurance schemes, the work of non-profit charitable foundations, and access to financial resources have transformed security in postindustrial nations and also reduced the vital role of religion in people’s lives. Even relatively affluent nations have multiple pockets of long-term poverty, whether afflicting unemployed African-Americans living in the inner cities of Los Angeles and Detroit; farm laborers in Sicily; or Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian émigrés in Leicester and Birmingham. Populations typically most at risk in industrialized nations, capable of falling through the welfare safety net, include the elderly and children; single-parent, female-headed households; the long-term disabled, homeless, and unemployed; and
35 The survey criteria used by this organization develops a 7-point scale based on the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights; the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief; and the European Convention on Human Rights. See Paul Marshall, ed., Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2000).
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Table 3. Human security, religious markets, and religiosity in post-industrial societies Indicators
Religious Participation Ra Sig.b
RELIGIOUS MARKETS Religious pluralismc
Frequency of Prayer Ra Sig.b
N of nations
.018
n/s
.119
n/s
21
Religious Freedom Indexd
.367
n/s
.477
n/s
21
State regulation of religione
.427
n/s
.423
n/s
18
Freedom House religious freedom scalef
-.314
n/s
-.550
n/s
13
Human Development Indexg
-.249
n/s
.077
n/s
21
Economic inequality (GINI coeffecient)h
.496
*
.614
*
18
HUMAN SECURITY
a
Pearson simple correlations without prior controls. Statistical significance. N/s = not significant, *p<.05, and **p<.01 (2-tailed). c Data from the Herfindahl Index (Alesina et al. 2002). d See Appendix C of Norris and Inglehart (2004) for details of the construction of this scale. e Scale measured by Chaves and Cann (1992). f Data from <www.freedomhouse.org> (2001). g Data from United Nations Development Program, World Development Report (New York: UNDP/Oxford University Press, 2003), <www.undp.org>. h Data from World Bank, World Development Indicators, <www.worldbank.org> (2002). b
ethnic minorities. If we are correct that feelings of vulnerability are driving religiosity, even in rich nations, then this should be evident by comparing levels of economic inequality across societies, as well as by looking at the strength of religiosity among the poorer sectors of society. We analyzed the distribution of economic resources in post-industrial societies by comparing the GINI coefficient, which measures the extent to which the distribution of income among households within a society deviates from a perfectly equal distribution.36 Table 3 indicates that the Human Development Index fails to predict variations in levels of religious behavior within post-industrial nations, not surprisingly since all these countries are highly developed. Yet the level of economic inequality proves strongly and significantly related to both forms of religious behavior, but especially to
36 The
GINI coefficient ranges from perfect equality (0) to perfect inequality (100), estimated in the latest available year by the World Bank.
88
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
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Figure 7. Religiosity and economic inequality. Mean frequency of prayer per society is based on responses to the question “How often do you pray to God outside of religious services? Every day (7), more than once a week (6), once a week (5), at least once a month (4), several times a year (3), less often (2), never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001.) Economic inequality is gauged by the GINI coefficient. (World Bank, World Development Indicators, <www.worldbank.org> 2002.)
the propensity to engage in individual religiosity through prayer. Figure 7 illustrates this relationship; the United States is exceptionally high in religiosity in large part, we believe, because it is also one of the most unequal post-industrial societies under comparison. Despite private affluence for the well-off, many American families, even in the professional middle classes, face serious risks of loss of paid work by the main breadwinner, the dangers of sudden ill health without adequate private medical insurance, vulnerability to becoming a victim of crime, as well as the problems of paying for long-term care of the elderly. Americans face greater anxieties than citizens in other advanced industrialized countries about whether or not they will be covered by medical insurance, be fired arbitrarily, or be forced to choose between losing their jobs and devoting themselves to their newborn children.37 The entrepreneurial culture and the emphasis
37 For
a discussion of the comparative evidence, see Derek Bok, The State of the Nation: Government and the Quest for a Better Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
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on personal responsibility has generated conditions of individual freedom and delivered considerable societal affluence, and yet one trade-off is that the United States has greater income inequality than any other advanced industrial democracy. 38 By comparison, despite recent pressures on restructuring, the secular Scandinavian and West European states remain some of the most egalitarian societies, with relatively high levels of personal taxation but also an expansive array of welfare services in the public sector, including comprehensive healthcare, social services, and pensions.39 If this argument rested only on the cross-national comparisons, then, of course, it would be too limited, as multiple other characteristics distinguish Western Europe and the United States. But evidence can also be examined at the individual level by looking at how far the distribution of income relates to religious behavior. The patterns in Figure 8 show that religiosity is systematically related at the individual level to the distribution of income groups in post-industrial societies: the poor are almost twice as religious as the rich. Similar patterns can be found in the United States (see Figure 9): two-thirds (66 percent) of the least well-off income group pray daily, compared with 47 percent of the highest income group.
Conclusions and Implications Secularization is not a deterministic process, but one that is largely predictable, based on knowing just a few facts about levels of human development and socioeconomic equality in each country. The levels of societal and individual security in any society provide the most persuasive and parsimonious explanations and predictors, despite the numerous possible explanatory factors that could be brought into the picture, from institutional structures to state restrictions on freedom of worship, the historical role of church-state relations, and patterns of denominational and church competition. Conditions that people experience in their formative years have a profound impact upon their cultural values. Growing up in societies in which survival is uncertain is conducive to a strong emphasis on religion; conversely, experiencing high levels of existential security throughout one’s formative years reduces the subjective importance of
38 A
recent detailed study comparing the levels of household income after government redistribution through tax and welfare transfers, based on the Luxembourg Income Study database, found that the GINI coefficient for income inequality was greatest in the United States compared with thirteen other advanced industrial democracies. See David Bradley, Evelyn Huber, Stephanie Moller, Francois Nielsen, and John D. Stephens, “Distribution and Redistribution in Postindustrial Democracies,” World Politics 55.1 (2003): 193–228.
39 Katherine
McFate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson, eds., Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy: Western States in the New World Order (New York: Russell Sage, 1995); Alexander Hicks, Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism: A Century of Income Security Policies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Gosta Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
90
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-FWFMPGJODPNF Figure 8. Religiosity by income in post-industrial societies. The percentage of the public who pray daily and who regard religion as very important by decile household income group (counting all wages, salaries, pensions, and other incomes before taxes and other deductions) in post-industrial societies. (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001.)
religion in one’s life. This hypothesis diverges sharply from the religious market assumption that demand for religion is constant. On the contrary, our interpretation implies that the demand for religion should be far stronger among low-income nations than among rich ones, and among the less secure strata of society than among the affluent. As a society moves past the early stages of industrialization and life becomes less nasty, less brutish, and longer, people tend to become more secular in their orientations. The most crucial explanatory variables are those that differentiate between vulnerable societies and societies in which survival is so secure that people take it for granted during their formative years. What must be included is that, although rising levels of existential security are conducive to secularization, cultural change is path-dependent: the historically predominant religious tradition of a given society tends to leave a lasting impact on religious beliefs and other social norms, ranging from approval of divorce, to gender roles, tolerance of homosexuality, and work orientations. The citizens of historically Protestant societies continue to display values that are distinct from those prevailing in historically 91
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-FWFMPGJODPNF Figure 9. Religiosity by income in the U.S. The percentage of the American public who pray daily and who regard religion as very important by decile household income group (counting all wages, salaries, pensions, and other incomes before taxes and other deductions). (World Values Survey, pooled 1981– 2001.)
Catholic, Hindu, Orthodox, or Confucian societies. These cross-national differences persist even in societies where the vast majority no longer attends church and reflect historical influences that shaped given national cultures. Thus, within the Netherlands, Catholics, Protestants, and those who have left the church all tend to share a common national value system that is distinctive in global perspective. Thus, while economic development brings systematic changes, a society’s cultural heritage continues to influence cultural direction. While secularization started earliest and has moved farthest in the most economically developed countries, little or no secularization has taken place in the low-income countries, meaning that the cultural differences linked with economic development not only are not shrinking, but are growing larger. This expanding gap between sacred and secular societies around the globe has important consequences for our current religious and political landscapes, our cultural change, and our new forms of identity politics.
92
French Secularism and the “Islamic Veil Affair”1 Talal Asad
I
n what follows I want to look in some detail at the so-called Islamic veil affair in France and its central articulation in the Stasi commission report. But first a caveat: Much has been written on this subject, some arguing for and some against the right of young Muslim women to wear the headscarf in school; my essay is not part of that debate. Nor is it in any sense an attempt to offer solutions to what is often called “the crisis of laïcité.” Its more modest aim is simply to try and understand some concepts and practices of French secularism. For most of 2003 and 2004, following a speech by the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy in April 2003, French public opinion was exercised by the affair of the “‘foulards islamiques’ [Islamic scarves].”2 Should Muslim girls be allowed to wear a covering over their hair when they are in public schools? The dominant view was definitely that they should not. A considerable amount of polemic has been published on this topic, in France as well as elsewhere. This was not the first time that the matter had been publicly discussed, but on this occasion the outcome was a law prohibiting the display of religious differences in public schools.
1
This essay is adapted from a longer chapter, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” forthcoming in Political Theologies, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). I am grateful to a number of friends for comments on various versions of this essay: Mustapha Alem, Jonathan Boyarin, Marcel Detienne, Veena Das, Baber Johansen, Mahmood Mamdani, Ruth Mas, David Scott, Markha Valenta, and Peter van der Veer. They should not, of course, be taken as endorsing my views.
2
See John Bowen, “Muslims and Citizens, France’s Headscarf Controversy,” Boston Review (February/ March 2004): 31. This is also a useful overview of the controversy.
Talal Asad is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A renowned anthropologist of religion, particularly religion in the Middle East, he is the author of a number of books including Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003).
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The headscarf worn by Muslim schoolgirls has become the symbol of many aspects of social and religious life among Muslim immigrants and their offspring to which secularists object. Researchers have enquired into the reasons for their lack of integration into French society, and especially for the drift of many of their youth towards “fundamentalist Islam” (l’islamisme), a drift that some of them trace to pervasive racism and to economic disadvantage, but that others see as a result of manipulations by conservative Middle Eastern countries and by inflammatory Islamist websites.3 Intellectuals have debated whether, and if so, how, it is possible for religious Muslims to be integrated into secular French society. The passions that have led to the new law are remarkable, and not only on the part of French Muslims. It is felt by what seems to be the majority of French intellectuals and politicians—of the left as well as of the right—that the secular character of the Republic is under threat by aspects of Islam that they see as being symbolized by the headscarf. I want to suggest that the French secular state today abides in a sense by the cuius regio eius religio principle (the reliattention of subjects to othergion of the ruler is the religion of his subjects), even though it disclaims any religious allegiance and governs worldly concerns, state power a largely irreligious society. In my view it is not the comneeds to define its proper place mitment to or interdiction of a particular religion that is most significant in this principle but the installation of a for the worldly wellbeing of single absolute power—the sovereign state—drawn from a the population in its care. single abstract source and facing a single political task: the worldly care of its population regardless of its beliefs. As Emile Durkheim pointed out in his writings on integration, the state is now a transcendent as well as a representative agent. And as Hobbes showed, it can now embody the abstract principle of sovereignty independent of the entire political population, whether governors or governed, and independent of any supernatural power.
…since “religion” directs the
One way of looking at the problem that interests me is this: since “religion” directs the attention of subjects to other-worldly concerns, state power needs to define its proper place for the worldly wellbeing of the population in its care. (This doesn’t include the guarantee of life; the state may kill or let die its own while denying that right to anyone else. But it does include the encouragement of a flourishing consumer culture.) An image of worldly wellbeing that can be seen in social life and so believed in is needed, but so is an answer to the question: what are the signs of religion’s presence? Laïcité therefore seems to me comparable to other secularisms, such as that of the United States, a society hospitable to religious belief and activism in which the federal government also finds the need to define religion.
3
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It is estimated that more than half the inhabitants of French prisons are young Muslims of North African origin. See Jerusalem Report (6 May 2002).
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Reading Signs Because religion is of such capital importance to the lay Republic, that Republic reserves for itself the final authority to determine whether the meaning of given symbols (by which I mean conventional signs) is “religious.” One might object that this applies only to the meaning of signs in public places, but since the legal distinction between public and private spaces is itself a construction of the state, the scope and content of “public space” is primarily a function of the Republic’s power. The arguments presented in the media about the Islamic …in the event of a conflict headscarf affair were therefore embedded in this power. between constitutional They seemed to me not so much about tolerance towards Muslims in a religiously diverse society, nor even about the principles, the state’s right to strict separation between religion and the state. They were defend its personality would first and foremost about the structure of political liberties— trump all other rights. about the relations of subordination and immunity, the recognition of oneself as a particular kind of self—on which this state is built, and about the structure of emotions that underlie those liberties. The dominant position in the debate assumed that in the event of a conflict between constitutional principles, the state’s right to defend its personality would trump all other rights. The state’s inviolable personality was expressed in and through particular images, including those signifying the abstract individuals whom it represented and to which they in turn owed unconditional obedience. The headscarf worn by Muslim women was held to be a religious sign conflicting with the secular personality of the French Republic. The eventual outcome of such debates about the Islamic headscarf in the media and elsewhere was the President’s appointment of a commission of enquiry charged with reporting on the question of secularity in schools. The commission was headed by ex-minister Bernard Stasi, and it heard testimony from a wide array of persons. In December 2003, a report was finally submitted to the President recommending a law that would prohibit the display of any “conspicuous religious signs” (des signes ostensibles) in public schools—including veils, kippas, and large crosses worn around the neck. On the other hand, medallions, little crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, or miniature Qur’ans, that the report designates “discreet signs” (les signes discrets), are authorized.4 In making all these stipulations, the commission clearly felt the need to appear even-handed. The proposed law was formally passed by the National Assembly
4
Rapport au President de la République: Commission de réflection sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, remis 11 December 2003, <www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr>. The report has also been published in book form as Laïcité et République, Commission présidée par Bernard Stasi (Paris: La Documentation française, 2004). My references are to the latter.
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in February 2004 by an almost unanimous vote. There were some demonstrations of young Muslims—as there had been earlier when the Stasi commission had formally made its recommendation—but the numbers who protested openly were small. Most French Muslims seemed prepared to follow the new law, some reluctantly.5 I begin with something the Stasi report does not address: according to the Muslims who are against the ban for reasons of faith, the wearing of the headscarf by women in public is a religious duty, but carrying “discreet signs” is not. Of course there are many Muslims, men and women, who maintain that the wearing of a veil is not a duty in Islam, and it is undoubtedly true that even those who wear it may do so for a variety of motives. However, if the wearer assumes the veil as an obligation of her faith, if her conscience impels her to wear it as an act of piety, the veil becomes for that reason an integral part of herself. For her it is not a sign intended to communicate something but part of an orientation, of a way of being. For the Stasi commission, in contrast, all the wearables mentioned are signs, regarded, furthermore, as displaceable signs. The Stasi commission takes certain signs to have a “religious” meaning by virtue of their synecdochic relation to systems of collective representation—in which, for example, the kippa stands for “Judaism,” the cross for “Christianity,” the veil for “Islam.” What a given sign signifies is therefore a central question. I stress that although the Stasi report nowhere defines “religion,” it assumes the existence of such a definition because the qualifying form of the term (“religious signs”) rests on a substantive form (“religion”). There are two points that may be noted in this connection. First, precisely because there is disagreement among contemporary pious Muslims as to whether the headscarf is a divinely required accoutrement for women, its “religious” significance must be indeterminate for non-Muslims. Only by rejecting one available interpretation (“the headscarf has nothing whatever to do with real religion”) in favor of another (“the veil is an Islamic symbol”) can the Stasi commission insist on its being obviously a “religious” sign. This choice of the sign’s meaning enables the commission to claim that the principle of laïcité is breached by the “Islamic veil,” and that since laïcité is not negotiable the veil must be removed. The second point is this: the “religious” signs forbidden on school premises are distinguished by their gender dimension—the veil is worn by women, the kippa by men, and the cross by both sexes. The object of the whole exercise is of course to ban the Islamic
5
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The Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF) ordered its youth wing, one of the organizers of the February 13th demonstration against the law, to desist from open struggle against the law, although it did not discourage people from participating as individuals. At the annual meeting of the UOIF at Le Bourget in April 2004, its president denounced what he saw as the move from a “tolerant, open and generous secularism, that is to say a secularism aiming at integration [une laïcité d’intégration], to a secularism of exclusion [une laïcité d’exclusion]” signaled by the new law. See the account by Catherine Coroller, “UOIF: ‘La loi sur la laïcité est là et nous l’appliquerons,’” Libération (12 April 2004).
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veil partly because it is “religious” but also because it signifies “the low legal status of women in Muslim society” (a secular signification). However, the girls who are the object of the school ban are French living in France; they are therefore subject to French law and not to the shari’a. Since French law no longer discriminates between citizens on grounds of gender or religious affiliation, since it no longer allows, as it did until 1975, that a man may chastise his wife for insubordination, the sign designates not a real status but an imaginary one, and therefore an imaginary transgression. Ideally, the process of signification is both rational and clear, and it is precisely these qualities that make it capable of being rationally criticized. It is assumed that a given sign signifies something that is clearly “religious.” What is set aside in this assumption, however, is the entire realm of ongoing discourses and practices that provide authoritative meanings. The precision and fixity accorded to the relationship of signification is always an arbitrary act and often a spurious one where embodied language is concerned. In other words, what is signified by the headscarf is not some historical reality (the evolving Islamic tradition) but another sign (the eternally fixed “Islamic religion”) which, despite its overflowing character, is used to give the “Islamic veil” a stable meaning. Assuming for the sake of argument that certain signs are essentially religious, where and how may they be used to make a statement? According to the Stasi report, secularism does not insist on religion being confined to the privacy of conscience, to its being denied public expression. On the contrary, it says that the free expression of religious signs (things, words, sounds that partake of a “religious” essence) is an integral part of the liberty of the individual. As such it is not only legitimate but essential to the conduct of public debate in a secular democracy—so long as the representatives of the different religious opinions do not attempt to dominate it. But what “domination” means when one is dealing with a religiously defined minority, whose traditional religion is actively practiced by a small proportion of that minority, is not very clear. It is interesting that the determination of meanings by the commission was not confined to what was visible. It included the deciphering of psychological processes such as desire and will. Thus the wearer’s act of displaying the sign was said to incorporate the actor’s will to display it—and therefore became part of what the headscarf meant. As one of the commission members later explained, its use of the term “displaying,” manifestant, was meant to underline the fact that certain acts embodied “the will to (make) appear,” volonté d’apparaitre.6 The Muslim identity of the headscarf wearer was crucial to the headscarf ’s meaning because the will to display it had to be read from that identity. (Another aspect of its meaning came from equating the-will-to-make-the-veil-appear
6
Interview with Ghislaine Hudson, published as “Laïcité: une loi nécessaire ou dangereuse?” Le Monde (11 December 2003).
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with “Islamic fundamentalism,” or “Islamism,” terms used interchangeably to denote a range of different endorsements of public Islam.) Paradoxically, Republican law thus realizes its universal character through a particular (female Muslim) identity, that is, a particular psychological internality. However, the mere existence of an internal dimension that is accessible from outside is felicitous for secularism. It opens up the universal prospect of cultivating Republican selves in public schools. At any rate, “the will” itself is not seen but the visible veil points to it, as one of the veil’s effects. “Desire” is treated even more interestingly. The commission’s concern with the desires of pupils is expressed in a distinction between those who didn’t really want to wear the headscarf and those who did. It is not very clear exactly how these “genuine desires” were deciphered, although reference is made to pressure by traditional parents and communities, and one assumes that some statements to that effect must have been made to the commission.7 It is worth remarking that solicitude for the “real” desires of the pupils applied only to girls who wore the headscarf. No thought appears to have been given to determining the “real” desires of girls who did not wear the headscarf. Was it possible that some of them secretly wanted to wear a headscarf but were ashamed to do so because of what their French peers and people in the street might think and say? Or could it be that they were hesitant for other reasons? However, in their case surface appearance alone was sufficient for the commission: no headscarf worn means no desire to wear it. In this way “desire” is not discovered but semiotically constructed. This asymmetry in the possible meanings of the headscarf as a sign again makes sense if the commission’s concern is seen to be not simply a matter of scrupulousness in interpreting evidence in the abstract but of guiding a certain kind of behavior—hence the commission’s employment of the simple binary “coerced or freely chosen” in defining desire. The point is that in ordinary life the wish to do one thing rather than another is rooted in dominant conventions, in loyalties and habits one has acquired over time, as well as in the anxieties and pleasures experienced in interaction with lovers and friends, with relatives, teachers, and other authority figures. But when “desire” is the objective of discipline, there are only two options: it must either be encouraged (hence “naturalized”) or discouraged (hence declared “specious”). And the commission was certainly engaged in a disciplining project. So the commission saw itself as being presented with a difficult decision between two forms of individual liberty—that of girls whose desire was to wear the headscarf (a minority) and that of girls who would rather not. It decided to accord freedom to the
7
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See Laïcité et République 102–3.
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latter on majoritarian grounds.8 This democratic decision is not inconsistent with laicïté, although it does conflict with the idea that religious freedom is an inalienable right of each citizen—which is what the Rights of Man (and, today, any declaration of human rights) articulates.9 But more important, I think, is the detachment of desire from its object (the veil) so that it becomes neutral, something to be counted, aggregated, and compared numerically. Desires are essentially neither “religious” nor “irreligious”; they are simply socio-psychological facts. Now I have been suggesting not only that government officials decide what sartorial signs mean but that they do so by privileged access to the wearer’s motive and will—to her subjectivity—and that this is facilitated by resort to a certain kind of semiotics. To the extent that this is so, the commission was a device to constitute meanings by drawing on internal (psychological) or external (social) signs, and it allowed certain desires and sentiments to be encouraged at the expense of others. A government commission of enquiry sought to bring “private” concerns, commitments, and sentiments into “public” scrutiny in order to assess their validity for a secular Republic. The public sphere, a guarantee of liberal democracy, does not afford citizens a critical distance from state power here. It is the very terrain on which that power is deployed to ensure the proper formation of its subjects. From its beginning the idea of the secular Republic seems to have been torn in two conflicting directions—insistence on the withdrawal of the state from all matters of religion (which must include abstention from even trying to define “religious signs”), and the responsibility of the state for forming secular citizens (by which I do not mean persons who are necessarily “irreligious”). The Stasi report seizes this basic contradiction as an occasion for creative interpretation. The trouble with the earlier legal judgments relating to the veil, it says, is that the judge did not think he had the power to pronounce on the interpretation of the meaning of religious signs. Here was an inherent limit to the intervention of the judge. It seemed to him impossible to enter into the interpretation given to
8
“After we heard the evidence, we concluded that we faced a difficult choice with respect to young Muslim girls wearing the headscarf in state schools. Either we left the situation as it was, and thus supported a situation that denied freedom of choice to those—the very large majority—who do not want to wear the headscarf; or we endorsed a law that removed freedom of choice from those who do want to wear it. We decided to give freedom of choice to the former during the time they were in school, while the latter retain all their freedom for their life outside school” (Patrick Weil, “A Nation in Diversity: France, Muslims and the Headscarf,” <www.opendemocracy.com> [25 March 2004]).
9
The Stasi report cites various international court judgments in support of its argument that the right to religious expression is always subject to certain conditions; see Laïcité et République 47–50. My point here is not that this right—or any other—should be absolute and unlimited; it is simply that a right cannot be inalienable if it is subject (for whatever reason) to the superior power of the state’s legal institutions to define and limit. To take away a right in part or whole on grounds of utility (including public order) or morality means that it is alienable.
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one or another sign by a religion. Consequently, he was not able to understand that the wearing of the veil by some young women can mean discrimination between man and woman. And that of course is contradictory to a basic principle of the Republic.10 The Stasi report regrets that judges in these cases had refused to enter the domain of religious signs. It wants the law to fix meanings, and so it recommends legislation that will do just that. But first it has to constitute religious signs whose meanings can be deciphered according to objective rules. For what the commission calls “a sign” is nothing in itself. “Religious signs” are part of the game that the secular Republic plays. More precisely, it is in playing that game that the abstract being called the modern state is realized. One might suggest that for the Stasi commission the headscarf worn by Muslim schoolgirls is more than a sign. It is an icon in the sense that it does not simply designate but evoke. What is evoked is not a headscarf (un foulard ) but “the Islamic veil” (le voile islamique). More than an image, the veil is an imaginary—a shrouded difference waiting to be unveiled, to be brought into the light of reason, and made indifferent.
Dealing with Exceptions A question that arises is whether there is any place in laïcité for rights attached to religious groups. And the answer is that indeed there is, although such groups are usually thought of as exceptions. Perhaps the most striking are Christian and Jewish schools, private establishments “under contract” (sous contrat) to the government, that are heavily subsidized by the secular state. In these state-supported religious schools, where it is possible, among other things, to display crosses and kippas, and where religious texts are systematically taught, pupils nevertheless grow up to become good French citizens. How important is this educational sector? According to the latest government figures, slightly over 20 percent of all high school pupils are enrolled in religious schools. 11 (Incidentally, even in public schools where “ostentatious religious signs” are now forbid-
10 “Le
juge n’a pas cru pouvoir se prononcer sur l’interprétation du sens des signes religieux; il s’agit là d’une limite inhérente à l’intervention du juge: Il lui a semblé impossible d’entrer dans l’interprétation donnée par une religion à tel ou tel signe. Par conséquent, il n’a pu appréhender les discriminations entre l’homme et la femme, contraires à un principe fondamental de la République, que pouvait revêtir le port du voile par certaines jeunes filles” (Laïcité et République 69–70). However, as far as school is concerned, the report believes that in dealing with some religious signs (texts) pupils should not concern themselves with theological meanings (Laïcité et République 34).
11 See
<www.education.gouv.fr/systeme_educatif/enseignment_prive.html>. Of course, not all the parents of children enrolled in these schools have concerns about the spiritual education of their offspring; it is simply that they want them to have “a good education.” Because they are more selective (that is, middle class) and often better funded than public schools, religious schools tend to maintain higher educational standards. Their teachers are also less likely to go on strike than those working in public sector schools.
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den, separate dining arrangements are made for Muslim and Jewish pupils who wish to follow their religious dietary laws.) There are more exceptions that reinforce the attachment of individuals to religious communities: chaplains in the army, colleges, schools, prisons, and hospitals, are all provided and paid for by the state. Jewish and Muslim funerary rites are permitted in cemeteries although they are all owned and maintained by the state. According to the 1987 law, gifts made to religious associations benefit from tax concessions—like other associations that provide a general public service. The Stasi report acknowledges these exceptions to the principle of the state’s absolute neutrality but sees them as “reasonable modifications” that allow each person to exercise his/her religious liberty.12 Thus these exceptions all have a politico-legal presence in the secular structure of the French Republic. To these organizations belong many citizens, clerical and lay, whose sensibilities are partly shaped by that belonging. Do such groupings amount to “communitarianism”? The term is less important than the fact that France consists of a variety of groupings that inhabit the public space between private life and the state. And since they dispose of unequal power in the formulation of public policy, the state’s claim of political neutrality towards all “religious” groups is rendered problematic. The Stasi commission is aware of exceptions to the general rule of laïcité. It explains them by distinguishing between the founding principle of secularism (that the lay Republic respect all beliefs) and the numerous legal obligations that issue from this principle but that also sometimes appear to contradict it. The legal regime, it points out in its report, is not at all a monolithic whole; it is at once dispersed in numerous legal sources and diversified in the different forms it takes throughout mainland France and in its overseas territories. The scattered sources and diverse forms of French secularism mean that the Republic has constantly to deal with exceptions. I want to suggest that that very exercise of power to identify and deal with the exception is what subsumes the differences within a unity, and confirms Republican sovereignty. The banning of the veil as a sign can therefore be seen as an exercise in sovereign power, an attempt by a centralized state to dominate public space as the space of particular signs. I want to stress that my interest is not in arguing that France is inadequately secular or that it is intolerant. No actually existing secularism should be denied its claim to secularity just because it does not correspond to some utopian model. Varieties of remembered religious history, of perceived political threat and opportunity, define the sensibilities underpinning secular citizenship and national belonging in a modern state. The sensibilities are not always secure, they are rarely free of contradictions, and they are sometimes fragile. But they make for qualitatively different forms of secularism.
12 See
Laïcité et République 52–4.
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What is at stake here, I think, is not the toleration of difference but sovereignty that defines and justifies exceptions, and the quality of the spaces that secularism defines as public. The “crisis of laïcité ” seems to me uniquely embedded in a political struggle over two idealized models of France’s future, a division that cuts across left and right parties: a highly centralized and controlling state versus a decentralized and minimalist one, in both of which the need to exercise sovereignty seems to be taken for granted. This struggle has somehow come to be linked to the state’s principled definition of religion and its “public” limits in the interest of creating “a community of sentiment.”
Passionate Subjects The politics of secularism are fraught with emotion, calling into question the very idea of neutrality. Guilt, contempt, fear, resentment, virtuous outrage, sly calculation, pride, anxiety, compassion, all intersect ambiguously in the secular Republic’s collective memory and inform attitudes towards its religiously or ethnically identified citizens. Laïcité is not blind to religiously defined groups in public. It is suspicious of some (Muslims) because of what it imagines they may do, or is ashamed in relation to others (Jews) because of what they have suffered at the hands of Frenchmen. The desire to keep some groups under surveillance while making amends to others—and thus of coming “honorably” to terms with one’s own past, of re-affirming France as a nation restored—are emotions that sustain the integrity of the lay Republic. And they serve to obscure the rationality of communication and the clarity of signs that are explicitly assumed by the Stasi commission. All modern states, even those committed to promoting “tolerance,” are built on complicated emotional inheritances that determine relations among its citizens. In France one such inheritance is the image of and hostility towards Islam; another is the image of and (until recently) antipathy towards Judaism. For a long time, and for many, Jews were the “internal other.” In a complicated historical readjustment this status has now been accorded to Muslims instead. One might therefore wonder whether the headscarf affair wasn’t generated by a displacement of the society’s anxieties about its own uncertain political predicament or its economic and intellectual decline. In a witty and incisive review of the Stasi report, the French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray has recently claimed that this is how the headscarf affair should be understood—as an example of “political hysteria” in which symbolic repression and displacement take place to obscure material realities. 13 Terray points out that in discussing the “threat to the functioning of the social services,” the
13 Emmanuel Terray, “Headscarf Hysteria,” New Left Review 26 (March/April 2004): 118–27. See especially
Laïcité et République 90–6.
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Stasi report makes no mention of inadequate funding but focuses instead on the minor difficulties created when some Muslims make “religious” demands in schools, hospitals, or prisons. Of course, this is precisely what laïcité is. Its overriding concern is with transcendent values (neutrality of the state, the separation of “religion” from politics, “sacredness” of the republican compact, etc.) and not with immanent materialities (distribution of resources, flexibility of organizations, etc.). Isn’t this why the strong defenders of laïcité seem unwilling to explore the complicated connections between these two? The antipathy (even hostility) evoked in this affair is, quite simply, part of what it means to be a secular Frenchman or Frenchwoman, to have an identity formed by layers of educated emotions. The affair is about signs and about the passions evoked by them. The signs do have political and economic implications, but they do not stand as empty masks. The advocates of secularism claim that signs are important when they signify the worldly equality of all human beings and invite compassion for human suffering. There is a special sense in which this claim is right, although the game of signification is much more complicated than spokespersons for the Republic declare it is. Defenders of the veil claim that it is integral to their reliHow does the secular state gious beliefs. How does the secular state address the pain address the pain of people who of people who are obliged to give up part of their religious heritage to show that they are acceptable? The simple are obliged to give up part of answer is: by expecting them to take beliefs lightly. Most their religious heritage to show liberals are not passionate in expressing their beliefs. It is worth recalling that in early modern Europe, neo-stoic that they are acceptable? thinkers who supported the emergence of the strong, secular state—the state that became the foundation of modern nationalism—did so because they saw passion as a destructive force that threatened the state. Since for them passion was identified with religious belief, this meant in effect a detachment from the latter—a skepticism in matters of faith. This virtue seems to have been absorbed into the style of liberalism, so that religious passion has tended to be represented—especially in a modern political context—as irrational and divisive. As in the political domain so in the private, and the sense among many is that passion is a disturbing force, the cause of much instability, intolerance, and unhappiness. Passionate support of secular beliefs, on the other hand, was not—is not—regarded in the same way. That passion is felt to be more like the public expression of “objective principle” rather than “subjective belief.” Where, as in the French Revolution, secular passion led to Terror, this was precisely because it was a revolution, a divided people in process of being made into a united Republic. In general, distress is a symptom of irrational and disrupted social conditions. “Good” passion is the work of secular enlightenment, not of religious bigotry. Yet ironically, although the emotional concern about anti-Semitism (or Islamophobia) is always an example of “good” (because secular) passion, being emotionally steeped in the object of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia (the traditions of Judaism or Islam themselves) may not be. 103
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Conclusion Defenders and critics of the Islamic veil law represent it in different ways, but secularists, whether pro or con, employ the same political language in which they assert something about the proper place of religion.14 I think that in doing so most of them miss how certain discourses can become part of the powerful practices that cultivate particular sensibilities essential to a particular kind of contradictory individual—one who is morally sovereign and yet obedient to the laws of the secular Republic, flexible and tolerant yet fiercely principled. The liberal idea is that it is only when this individual sovereignty is invaded by a body other than the representative democratic state that represents his individual will collectively, and other than the market, which is the state’s dominant civil partner (as well as its indispensable electoral technique), that free choice gives way to coerced behavior. But the fact that the notions of moral and political sovereignty are not coherent as descriptions of contemporary individual and collective life is less important than the fact that they are part of the apparatus of techniques for forming secular subject-citizens and that the public school has such an extraordinary ideological place in the Republic’s self-presentation. Central to that apparatus is the proper deployment of signs, a topic with which I began this essay. So I end with a few further remarks on it. The interesting thing about symbols (that is, conventional signs) is that they invite one to do a reading of them independently of people’s stated intentions and commitments. Indeed, the reading becomes a way of retrospectively constituting “real desires.” It facilitates the attempt to synthesize the psychological and juridical concepts of the liberal subject. Vincent Geisser records some of the ways that the French media represented those who wished to wear headscarves in school. At first, he notes, the young women with headscarves were represented as victims of their relatives. But then, in response to the latest sociological studies on the wearing of the veil that showed a complicated picture of the young women’s motives for wearing it, the media chose an even more alarmist interpretation: Henceforth it is the idea of “voluntary servitude” that prevails in media analyses: that young French women should themselves choose to wear the headscarf is precisely what makes them even more dangerous. This act is no longer to be seen as the consequence of family pressure but as the sign of a personal—and therefore fanatical—commitment.15
14 For
example, Henri Pena-Ruiz, “Laïcité et égalité, leviers d’émancipation,” Le Monde diplomatique (February 2004): 9; and Pierre Tevanian, “Une loi antilaïque, antiféministe et antisocial,” Le Monde diplomatique (February 2004): 8.
15 La
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nouvelle islamophobie (Paris: La Découverte, 2003) 31 (italics in original).
F rench secularism and the “ islamic veil affair ” / A sad
This, as Geisser points out, makes the veil appear even more threatening to the state school and to Republican values in general. Once one is in the business of uncovering dangerous hidden meanings, as in the Spanish Inquisitor’s search for hidden beliefs, one will find what one is looking for. Where the power to read symbols includes the construction of (religious/secular) intentions attributable to practitioners, even the distinction, made in the 1905 law of separation between Church and State between “freedom of conscience” (a moral immunity) and “freedom of religious practice” (a legal right), becomes difficult to maintain with clarity. Secularism is invoked to prevent two very different kinds of transgression: the perversion of politics by religious forces on the one hand, and the state’s restriction of religious freedom on the other. The idea that religion is a system of symbols becomes especially attractive in the former case, because in order to protect politics from religion (and especially certain kinds of religiously motivated behavior), in order to determine its acceptable forms within the polity, the state must identify “religion.” To the extent that this work of identification becomes a matter for the law, the Republic acquires the theological function of defining religious Secularism is invoked to signs and the power of imposing that definition on its subjects, prevent two very different of “assimilating” them. This may not be usually thought of as coercive power, but it is undoubtedly an intrusive one. The kinds of transgression: the Stasi report does not pretend otherwise. The secular state, it perversion of politics by insists, “cannot be content with withdrawing from all religious and spiritual matters.”16 religious forces on the one
hand, and the state’s Pierre Tevanian, a critic of the new law, has written that secularism as defined by the laws of 1881, 1882, and 1886, applies restriction of religious to the premises, the school curricula, and the teachers, but not freedom on the other. to the pupils. The latter are simply required to obey school rules, to attend all lessons properly, and to behave respectfully towards others.17 These founding texts appear to be echoed in the Council of State judgment of November 27, 1989 (issued on the occasion of an earlier crisis concerning the veil) that the Stasi report cites (“education should be provided with regard, on the one hand, to neutral curricula and teachers, and, on the other hand, to the liberty of conscience of the pupils”) and that it then glosses in its own fashion. 18 Instead of withdrawing completely from anything that describes itself as “religion” (while insisting that no behavior be allowed that disrupts the proper functioning of education) the Stasi report chooses to interfere with “religion” by seeking to define its acceptable place.
16 “Il
ne peut se contenter d’un retrait des affaires religeuses et spirituelles” (Laïcité et République 32).
17 Tevanian
8.
18 “L’avis
énonce que le principe de laïcité impose que ‘l’enseignement soit dispensé dans le respect, d’une part, de cette neutralité par les programmes et par les enseignants, d’autre part, de la liberté de conscience des élèves’” (66).
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Today it seems that “religion” continues to infect “politics” in France—partly as parody (the “sacred” foundation of the secular Republic) and partly as civilization (“JudeoChristian” values in the education of secular citizens). Whatever else laïcité may be, it is certainly not the total separation between religion and politics said to be required for living together harmoniously in a diverse modern society. It is a continuous attempt by the state apparatuses at encouraging subjects to make and recognize themselves through appropriate signs as properly secularized citizens who “know that they belong to France” (Only to France? Ultimately to France? Mainly to France?). Like other modes of secularism, laïcité is a modern form of political rule that seeks to define a particular kind of secular subject (whether “religious” or not) who can take part in the game of symbols—the right kind of conventional signs—to demonstrate his or her loyalty to the state. Where does all this leave the notion of “a community of shared values,” which is said to be minimally secured in a modern democratic society by secularism? My simple thought is that differences of class, gender, region, and ethnic origin do not constitute a community of shared values in France. Besides, modern France has always had a sizeable body of immigrants, all bringing in “foreign” ideas, habits, and experiences. The only significant difference is that since World War II they have been largely from North Africa. The famous slogan “la République une et indivisible” reflects a nationalist aspiration, not a social reality. Like people everywhere, the French are imbued with complex emotions about their fellow citizens, including a simple feeling that “France” belongs to them and not to Others. In any case, the question of feelings of belonging to the country is distinct from that of the rights and duties of citizenship; the former relates to dreams of nationalism, the latter to practices of civic responsibility. The ways in which the concept of “religion” operates in that culture as motive and as effect, how it mutates, what it affords and obstructs, what memories it shelters or excludes, are not eternally fixed. That is what makes varieties of secularism—including French laïcité—always unique. If one accepts this conclusion one may resist the temptation to think that one must either “defend secularism” or “attack civic religion.” One might instead learn to argue over the best ways of supporting particular liberties while limiting others, of minimizing social and individual harm. In brief, one might content oneself with assessing particular demands and threats without having to confront the general “danger of religion.”
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Secularity without Secularism: The Best Political Position for Contemporary Jews David Novak
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o group has benefited more from modern secularity than have the Jews. Modern secularity has enabled Jews to become full and equal participants in the secular societies in which almost all Jews now live. In pre-modern, presecular societies, Jews were at best tolerated and at worst they were persecuted as foreigners. Nevertheless, when these beneficiaries of modern secularity are told that they must affirm secularism as the ideological foundation of the secularity from which they have so benefited, then the cultural integrity of the Jews, especially but not exclusively, is seriously threatened. We need to define at the outset what is meant by “secularity” and then what is meant by “culture.” “Secularity” can be taken in two distinct senses. First, secularity is the modus operandi of a society that does not look to any particular religious tradition for the validation of its political authority in matters pertaining to the bodies and the property of its members, that is, matters dealt with by criminal and civil law. So, for example, that is why even though a majority of the citizens of the United States are Christians, and Christianity looks to the Bible to authorize all its practices, one cannot invoke biblical authority as a reason for public acceptance of any authorized practice in the United States. The authority of the Bible is only cogent for the members of a particular religious community who accept their tradition’s normative interpretation of the Bible. In theory and in fact, this has meant that even different groups that call themselves “Christian” do not accept each other’s biblically based normative teaching. As such, suggestions of “Christian
David Novak holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of thirteen books, most recently The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology (2005) and Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (2005).
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America” break down on the question: Whose Christianity—Catholic or Protestant—and if the latter, which Protestant Christianity? Even if one were to speak of “Judeo-Christian America” and assume that the biblical foundation of that society was the Old Testament (whose authority is accepted by both Jews and Christians), Jews would hardly accept as authoritative Christian biblical interpretation, any more than Christians would accept Jewish biblical interpretation on any significant normative issue. Instead of looking to any one religious tradition, or even to a combination of several religious traditions, a secular society looks for a moral consensus among its members in order to validate its political authority and its public policies. At least in the United States and Canada, however, the majority of the members of the secular civil society come from singular religious traditions, and it is in tandem with these traditions that they bring their morality.1 As such, most of these religious people are only willing to give their moral allegiance to a secular society whose public policies are consistent with the morality that has already come with their respective religious traditions. But if, on the contrary, any of these religious people makes the secular society their ultimate moral arbiter, they have thereby relegated their own religious tradition and its morality to a marginal role, one that is at odds with the primacy faithful adherents of that tradition have always attributed to it and its morality. Therefore, there is nothing irrational about a member of a traditional religious community affirming a public policy because this is what his or her tradition teaches, as long as he or she can also give the reason his or her tradition advocates that public policy. Inevitably, that reason has to be because this policy is for the good of any human society and not just for the members of his or her traditional community.2 Therefore, when a true moral consensus is reached in this kind of secular society, this consensus is not based on merely accidental historical overlappings between traditions. Rather, this consensus is rational, based on what these respective traditions hold to be basic moral norms that apply to all human persons because they are rationally evident, not because of the authority of any religious tradition itself. Traditional authority, by contrast, is rooted in a historical revelation and, as such, it can only claim those who are part of the community constituted by this revelation, and who have accepted, preserved, and transmitted that revelation to posterity. Any society that can respect the prior religious commitments of its members—commitments that actually enable them to live in a secular society in good faith—is a society of “moderate secularity.” Moderate secularity has largely obtained dominance, until quite recently, in the English-speaking West, namely Britain, the United States, and Canada.
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1
I say “singular” rather than “particular” inasmuch as all the religious traditions adhered to by citizens of a democratic polity would resist being taken as “parts” of some larger worldly genus called “religion.”
2
Logically speaking: the first “because” here denotes a “source” of a norm; the second, the end or purpose of a norm. For the argument that religious people can present both the source and the end of any of their stands on public morality, see David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 16–26.
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The second sense of secularity is what I would call “radical secularity.” Unlike moderate secularity, radical secularity looks to “secularism” for its primary justification. This kind of secularism found its first and most powerful expression in the French Revolution. At present, it is being vigorously promoted by certain “secularists,” especially in the United States and Canada, and by some of the leading proponents of the European Union. In this kind of secularity, a secular society does not look to any particular religious tradition for its political validation. In fact, it does not even look to any moral consensus among the religious traditions Any society that can respect the from which the majority of its members come. Instead, prior religious commitments this kind of secularity regards the members of the society as having no religio-moral background at all, or it of its members—commitments requires them to leave their cultural background outside that actually enable them to society’s door, so to speak, before gaining entrance to the process of public policy making. That is the case even live in a secular society in in matters pertaining to marriage, family relations, and good faith—is a society of sexuality, areas in which historic traditions have a very heavy investment. The only area of human interaction “moderate secularity.” that is seemingly left out of the range of secular public policy making is the area of religious ritual. Usually this exclusion is subsumed under what has come to be called “the right to privacy.” Yet it is hard to see how something like religious ritual, being the public practice of specific communities, can be justified as a form of privacy. For radical secularity, the prior religious commitments of its members, which are so very public, are a threat to the ultimate hegemony that the secular society, and especially the secular state with all its political power, claims for itself. Such societies are atheistic de facto (as is the case in France) or atheistic de jure (as was the case in the former Soviet Union). This latter view of secularity justifies itself in terms of individual autonomy, which means that human individuals are free to create themselves, as it were. Secular society entitles them—that is, grants them the right—to project whatever ends or goods they choose for themselves as their raison d’être, as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others to do likewise. However, even advocates of this type of secularity cannot equate human self-creation with the uniquely divine attribute of creatio ex nihilo. Unlike God, they still have to create themselves out of something already there, which means that their “self-creation” is really self-development. What this most often means is that the very goods individual members of society are “allowed” or “entitled” to choose turn out to be only those goods that the elites (those who have political or economic power in that society) provide, over which these elites have varying degrees of social control. As such, in this kind of secularity, the secular polity can accept no prior source of right; it cannot recognize any authority outside itself to make any valid public claims upon any of its citizens. At most, claims like those made by traditional religions upon their own members are only valid when they are consistent with the claims made upon citizens by the secular society itself. It is assumed all members of a secular society have ceded all prior rights to that society as the price of admission to it. And, for those 109
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who have long ago abandoned a Hobbesian view of the ceding of prior rights being an essential component of the total move from a state of nature to civil society, no such prior rights ever existed at all. The first and foremost of these prior rights are what could be called “cultural rights.” In Western democracies like the United States and Canada, the most basic of these cultural rights is the freedom of religion. Distinct from radically secular societies, in moderately secular societies freedom of religion is not an entitlement from society; it is a prior right that society is to respect, even honor—the only proviso being that the exercise of freedom of religion not violate the common good (as, for example, when the exercise of one’s religion endangers public safety). Since the way culture is dealt with denotes a major difference between a radically secular society and a moderately secular one, we now need to define what is meant by “culture.” In its deepest sense, “culture” means a way of life adhered to by a particular, historically continuous community. As an all-encompassing way of life, culture permeates the lives of the members of the historical community who bear it. The bearers of culture are a people. The people inevitably regard their raison d’être to be the maintenance and enhancement of their culture throughout history. Culture is not the invention of the people who bear it; it is their inheritance from the past. Even though the people have ample opportunity to change and develop many of the specific aspects of their culture in the course of transmitting it from the past through the present into the future, the people cannot change it beyond recognition from what it has generally been in the past, nor can they see it as having been superceded by some other culture. Moreover, cultures that recognize that they are not synonymous with humanity per se look to some particular historical event for their origin in the past. That particular event is inevitably a theophany, a revelation of God that calls a singular community into existence for an indefinite period of time, what in biblical terms is an “everlasting covenant” (Isaiah 55:3). That revelation is the transcendent warrant for the existence of the community founded upon it. Culture, then, seems to be identical with “religion.”3 Indeed, the Latin word cultura is closely related to the word cultus, both stemming from the verb colere, “to cultivate.” Both religion and culture are cultivated as living things by those who bear them, and in a deeper sense these people, both collectively and as individuals, are cultivated by their religious cultures. Accordingly, one might say that a culture is the outer form of its religion and that a religion is the inner intentionality of its culture. I know of no historical culture or tradition that does not have a revelation as its foundation, and I know of no democracy that claims to have been founded by a revelation from God. A democracy seems to be secular by definition. At most, a democracy can
3
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The only reason I use “culture” rather than “religion” is to avoid the modern mistake of separating culture from religion by making culture a matter of nostalgia and something which, unlike religion, makes no moral demands upon those who bear the cultural memory within a secular society.
S ecularit y without secularism / novak
affirm that God is supreme, implying the humanly created state is not. That seems to be the minimal reason for the mention of God at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities. Under the influence of radical secularity, many have a tendency to confuse culture with art, even though art in its original sense of “making” (as in the Greek poiesis, from which our word “poetry” comes) was developed as a cultural activity designed to inspire the members of a culture to re-experience the founding events of the culture in their transcendent dimension. Separated from A democracy seems to be culture, though, art becomes entertainment. When art retains its secular by definition. inspirational role, there is nothing disturbing about the presence of non-cultural art to anyone who is not a “puritan.” But when culture is reduced to art as entertainment, art so understood becomes a substitute for culture in its transcendent sense. Religious people cannot accept the reduction of their very public culture to the privacy of an “art form.” When reduced to entertaining art, culture can be relegated by a radically secular society to the realm of private taste. Secularist political claims are inevitably the claims made by those interest groups having economic and political power in a society. These interest groups see themselves as having a mandate to create culture, understood to be the way of life the society is dedicated to promoting—what incorporates the social energies usually involved in traditional religions and their moralities. Moreover, these interest groups often explicitly reject the notion that secular society derives its culture from earlier social engagements. Instead, they now require older cultures to either derive their moral authority from the secular polity or to totally obliterate themselves (as in a melting pot) into the new secular culture that these interest groups are continually creating and promoting. The emergence of radical secularity just before, during, and just after the French Revolution coincides with the political emancipation of Jews in the West. For Jews, 1789 (generally speaking) marks the abrupt end of the Middle Ages and the equally abrupt hurl into modernity. This meant that Jews gained the rights of all other individual citizens. But they thereby lost the collective rights they had when Jewish communities (qehillot) enjoyed a large degree of independence, when Jewish communities had considerable collective power in ordering the religious, familial, and even the economic lives of their members. All of this was obtained within a larger Christian polity (imperium in imperio), but one where Jews were related to the larger Christian polity as members of a community having a contracted communal status therein, rather than individual Jews having a direct relation to the sovereign (be it monarchial or republican) as did the Christian citizens of the polity. There were, to be sure, segments of the Jewish community who resented this elimination of what they took to be more ancient privilege than ancient discrimination. Many rabbis, especially, knew that the end of their ancien régime meant the loss of their 111
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political power to enforce Jewish religious tradition among people who had no civil recourse elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite their opposition, there was very little these traditionalist rabbis and their diminishing circle of committed followers could do to stem a historical-political reality that promised Europeans (and, later, North Americans) a freer, more intellectually open, and more prosperous life, and which seemed to be succeeding in delivering on that promise. The vast majority of Western Jews have seen the new secular political order to be a marked improvement over the time when, simultaneous with external political control by gentiles, rabbis could internally direct almost all Jewish social and intellectual efforts in the direction of traditional Jewish religion, which the rabbis alone were allowed to interpret and apply. The response of Jews in the West to this nouveau régime has been threefold. First, there have been Jews who have followed the Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, in taking this new secular political order to be their new theological-political reality, sufficient enough to make their separate Jewish existence not only redundant but a positive detriment to their becoming fully part of the newly created culture of secular modernity.4 These have been the assimilationists of various The most enthusiastic Jewish stripes. For them the chief attraction of this new culture has been its minimal dogmatic requirements, unlike those proponents of radical secularity requirements of the Christianity of the ancien régime.
have known that the political
The most enthusiastic Jewish proponents of radical secularity have known that the political revolution that their rights as equal citizens brought them their rights as equal citizens could not have come about without a cultural revolution. That revolucould not have come about tion occurred in the late eighteenth century, when the without a cultural revolution. still mostly Christian people of Western Europe (and their cousins in still politically and culturally primitive North America) in effect renounced the claim of their religion to be the transcendent warrant of the state’s political authority and their acceptance of it. That being the case, how could Jews—who had much more to gain than the already politically dominant Christians—do anything less if they wanted to be citizens of the new secular nationstates in good faith?
revolution that brought them
Second, there have been Jews who have not wanted total assimilation but who have believed that they could survive culturally and religiously by becoming a special interest group voluntarily functioning within a secular society with a warrant from the governing polity. By looking to the secular polity for their warrant, they have thereby ceded any real moral authority of the Jewish community. These liberal Jews have endorsed just
4
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See Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter 3; also, David Novak, The Election of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 26–49.
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about any moral position being promoted by the powerful political-cultural-intellectual elites in their society in the name of “progress.” This approach could be taken, whether explicitly stated by its liberal proponents or not, as being conducted in return for the “tolerance” of their particular religious practices by these powerful elites. This approach makes itself manifest, especially today, when liberal Jews suggest that the “spirit” of the Jewish tradition endorses such practices as abortion and same-sex marriage—practices that are explicitly proscribed by the “letter” of the Jewish tradition.5 The willingness of more and more liberal rabbis to almost celebrate abortions and to officiate at same-sex weddings indicates that the religious exclusivity formerly claimed even by liberal Jews has been elided by their concessions to secularist morality. Third, there have been traditionalist Jews, mostly known by the Jewish neologism “Orthodox,” who have attempted to keep as much distance as possible from the secularist culture and morality around them. Yet they too have accepted more of secularist ideology than many of them might realize. Like the liberals—whom they usually suspect, if not detest—they look to the secular polity for political entitlements. Just as the liberals look to the secularists for entitlements in order to be like them, so many Orthodox Jews look to these same secularists for an entitlement to be different from them. In other words, instead of challenging secularist morality in principle, these Jews (and Christian sectarians like them) are content to simply claim their “peculiar” religio-moral practices not be interfered with by the polity for the sake of something as elusive as “cultural diversity.” Instead of arguing that something like same-sex marriage is contrary to the rational-moral consensus of the various traditions that most of the citizens of society come from, these sectarians simply ask to be exempt from what is being promoted as public morality (that is, the right of everyone who wants to be married to be married). How long the secularists who seem to be gaining more and more power in the United States and Canada will “tolerate” such moral “diversity”—especially when it is being practiced by people otherwise quite involved in the society and its intellectual culture— is already being doubted by some of the more politically perceptive Orthodox Jews. Therefore, the task of traditionalist Jews who see themselves as being real participants in secular society is to work out a public philosophy that can fully affirm political, legal, and even intellectual secularity without succumbing to either the fervent affirmation of the program of secularism or to the cautious begging for dispensational tolerance from secularist elites. I for one am convinced that such a quest can find within the sources of the Jewish tradition authentic building blocks for the construction of a Jewish public philosophy adequate to the challenge of modern secularity, but which can avoid pitfalls offered to Jews by Jewish assimilationists, accomodationists, or sectarians.
5
In Jewish tradition, abortion is only allowable as a dispensation from a prohibition in cases where the fetus is a direct threat to the life of its mother. See David Novak, Law and Theology in Judaism, vol. 1 (New York: KTAV, 1974) 114–24.
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Such a Jewish public philosophy that affirms the value of secularity, without succumbing to secularism in its various guises, requires a society that sees itself to be multicultural rather than being dominated by a single culture or denying culture altogether. An example of such a society is Canada, even though its intellectual elites are now, for the most part, rigidly secularist. Canada was founded as a unique polity in 1867 by the union of predominantly EnglishProtestant Upper Canada (now Ontario) and predominantly French-Catholic Lower Canada (now Quebec). This union, formulated in the Articles of Confederation, did not require any people to give up its cultural identity and attendant morality (that was only required of the Aboriginal peoples, an injustice whose effects Canada is still experiencing). There was recognition of enough common morality between the two founding traditions to establish a secular polity, one that looked to this consensus for its moral warrant. Since that moral consensus is hardly limited to Protestants and Catholics alone, it could easily be joined by groups who, for the most part, came to Canada after 1867—such as the Jews. Canadian consensus is secular insofar as it does not look to any singular religious event for its warrant, like the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai for Jews or the Resurrection for Christians. Yet it is not secularist since it does not presume to create a new morality for its participants, let alone claim to create a new culture for them. The consensus is secular without being secularist because it only deals with what is penultimate in human existence: the maintenance of a just social order. It does not offer salvation of any kind, whether in this world or the next. For that reason, faithful Jews—and members of other historic faiths—can affirm the value of this society in good faith and be loyal to its political institutions, especially its laws. People of faith do not have to check their cultural baggage at the door of civil society before being granted admission. They can thus practice much of their religious culture in public without worrying that a larger secular domain will swallow them up. That, indeed, is true pluralism. The faithful can also practice much of their morality in concert with members of other historic faith communities whose basic morality looks very much like their own.6 That is why the Canadian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities can begin with an affirmation of “the supremacy of God and the rule of law,” two terms that can be taken in apposition. It means, maximally, that a majority of Canadians can recognize a divine lawgiver standing behind the moral norms they hold in common, and that this does not require the affirmation of any particular revelatory event. In other words, one can locate a consensus on what many would call “natural law.”
6
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The gradual inclusion of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs into this moral consensus belies the charge that it represents a “Judeo-Christian” cabal trying to impose the Bible on a secular society.
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To date, however, too much of Canadian-Jewish political advocacy has been ethnic advocacy, rather than an affirmation of true multiculturalism. This is probably due to Canadian-Jewish memories from the not-so-distant past of anti-Semitism coming from both the Anglo-Protestant and Franco-Catholic communities. Nonetheless, Canadian Jews can only affirm a multicultural secularity with others. And they can do this more honestly and effectively with Christians when they realize that there is no official antiSemitism being promoted by either the Catholic or Protestant churches in Canada (or elsewhere in the world). What is now needed is a theoretical perspective that can make the pursuit of multicultural secularity, to which anti-religious secularism stands in opposition, an intelligent public policy position of the Jews of Canada (and in other democratic societies). This true multiculturalism needs to protect itself and be protected from its enemies on the right—those who reduce culture to race and thus deny multiculturalism by proposing a policy of ethnicity for its own sake, the inevitable conclusion of which is racism. And this true multiculturalism needs similar protection from its enemies on the left, who attempt to replace culture with ideology.
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American Religion and European Anti-Americanism Thomas Albert Howard
T
he American invasion of Iraq in 2003 roiled transatlantic relations, offering a jarring impetus for intellectuals and policy makers to consider afresh various social and cultural differences between Western Europe and the United States, many of which had been wholly or partly obscured during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. “The war in Iraq has made the Atlantic seem wider,” the German journalist Peter Schneider noted in a 2004 New York Times op-ed, “but in reality it has had the effect of a magnifying glass, bringing older and more fundamental differences between Europe and the United States into focus.” Topping Schneider’s list was what we might call the religion factor. The United States is a deeply religious nation, he noted, “while in Europe the process of secularization continues unabated.”1 Other European intellectuals have expressed similar, if less dispassionate, sentiments, agitated in the extreme that the moral pitch of President Bush’s foreign policy—underwritten by a cabal of “neoconservative” intellectuals and “evangelical” electoral shock troops—constituted no episodic phenomenon, but expressed something entrenched, and irredeemable, in American history and culture. In part, this worry gave rise to a spectacularly staged series of essays in Europe’s newspapers of record on May 31, 2003, spearheaded by Jürgen Habermas with the late Jacques Derrida riding shotgun. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Habermas and Derrida called for a “core Europe”—principally France, Italy, Germany, and the Benelux countries—to serve as a “locomotive” of European integration “to counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States.” Besides offering policy suggestions, their essay engaged in transatlantic cultural analysis, touching upon religious differences: “In European societies,
1
Peter Schneider, “Across a Great Divide,” The New York Times (12 March 2004).
Thomas Albert Howard is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Jerusalem and Athens Forum at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. He is the author, most recently, of Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (2006). He is currently working on a project entitled “American Religion in the European Mind.”
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secularization is relatively developed…. [This] has had desirable consequences for our political culture. For us, a president who opens his daily business with public prayer... is hard to imagine.”2 The Italian philosopher and member of the European Parliament, Gianni Vattimo, lent a supporting voice in Italy’s La Stampa. Claiming knowledge of “something felt in the consciousness of all Europeans,” he made clear that “our spirit differs from the currently prevailing spirit in American society,” opining further that “our hope is that this difference will become the inspiring principle for a political system able to bestow on Europe the dignity and significance it deserves in world politics.” When detailing the differences, religion, once again, came to the fore: We [Europeans] are certainly familiar with the religious roots of North American society…. But—[the] religiosity that characterizes the American spirit has ended up manifesting itself as what we fear it really is: the notion that ‘God is with us,’ and the proof of it is in our economic and military superiority.3 For sociologists preoccupied with the so-called “secularization thesis,” the transatlantic religious divide has emerged as a truism in recent scholarship. While once sociologists held that modernity led inexorably to secularization in society, most now concede that this is not necessarily the case: the United States is at once a thoroughly modernized nation, indeed the paradigmatic example of modernity in many respects, and simultaneously awash in a sea of faith, especially when compared to most Western European societies. However, for scholars interested in the genealogy of European anti-Americanism, religion has received scant attention, despite being frequently invoked, almost offhandedly, as a leading dividing factor and source of misunderstanding between Europeans and Americans. Behind these invocatory references lies the assumption that disparaging assessments of religiosity in the United States—not unlike those of Habermas, Derrida, and Vattimo—emanate from a secular historical consciousness, inclined leftward politically, passing skeptical judgment on overly credulous “Yankees” slow to accept that enlightenment and the disenchantment of the world stand or fall together. In this essay, besides making the general point that religious differences need to be taken more seriously by students of transatlantic relations, I want to suggest that anti-American sentiments vis-à-vis religion are not simply a byproduct of Europe’s exceptional secularism and leftist political traditions. In fact, to understand the genealogy of European
2
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “Unsere Erneuerung; Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (31 May 2003).
3
Gianni Vattimo, “L’unione affronta i nodi decisivi del suo sviluppo,” La Stampa (31 May 2003).
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anti-Americanism in its full historical complexity, one must actually fix one’s gaze at the opposite end of the political spectrum, to misgivings about the United States emanating from voices on Europe’s historical right—or, borrowing from British political parlance, what I’ll call “the Tory imagination.” To be sure, European anti-Americanism has a recognizable “Whiggish” aspect too, a secularist-leftist mien, but this is of more recent provenance, nourished largely by Marxist political currents in the twentieth century and the juggernaut of “critical theory” in the post-war transatlantic academy. However, if we cast our glance farther back, to the nineteenth century, it becomes apparent that most European liberals and social democrats, even those inclined to radicalism, regularly lionized the United States—praising its religious voluntarism in particular—as an example of what European nation-states should aspire to, if only they could shake off the backlash to the French …anti-American sentiments Revolution and Napoleonic upheaval inaugurated by the vis-à-vis religion are not political Restoration of 1815, the resurgent ecclesiastical establishmentarianism of this era, and the climate of simply a byproduct of Europe’s Romantic nostalgia in literature and the arts.
exceptional secularism and
But it was also during the post-1815 era of Restoration and Romanticism that lasting anti-American images and metaphors first gained wide currency in European thought; they have since migrated to various points on the political landscape, perhaps particularly to the far left today, although repositories of an older Tory anti-Americanism have by no means been extinguished.4 Les extrêmes se touchent, as the French say, and this is perhaps especially true when considering anti-Americanism and the European political spectrum.
leftist political traditions.
After the collapse of the democratic experiment in France in the early nineteenth century, the fledgling American republic was the only state of any size in the world to still practice what many considered the invalidated ideas of democracy, equality, and religious voluntarism. At this time, numerous European visitors, immigrants, and intellectuals (many who never went abroad) sought to “explain” America to an Old World audience seemingly insatiable in its curiosity to make sense of the upstart nation. “America was the China of the nineteenth century,” as one scholar has put it, “described, analyzed, promoted, and attacked in virtually every nation struggling to come to terms with new social and political voices.”5 What had been regarded as a remote backwater of colonial exploitation in the eighteenth century became for Europeans, virtually overnight, truly a novus ordo seclorum, a phenomenon to be examined, a moral and political experiment to be judged, a possible laboratory of the future, as Alexis de Tocqueville asserted.
4
C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 21–2, 28–9.
5 Marc
Pachter and Frances Wein, eds., Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation, 1776–1914 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1976) xiii.
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Tocqueville’s own assessment of the fate of religion in the United States is fairly nuanced, but quite positive in many respects. “Upon my arrival in the United States,” run often quoted lines from his Democracy in America, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.... In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.6 When coupled with tales of persecuted religious minorities finding safe haven in America, Tocqueville’s interpretation suggests a fairly sanguine view of religious conditions in the new nation. But we should resist equating Tocqueville’s views on America with that of Europe’s intelligentsia tout court. To the conservative imagination of the nineteenth century, the American religious experiment and the political institutions enabling it represented a perilous plunge into cultural confusion and social anarchy. The French arch-conservative Joseph de Maistre might well serve as the archetype of this mindset; he saw the American and French revolutions, if not identical, as signs of profound impiety, political hubris against divinely sanctioned traditions. Austria’s Count Metternich, the diplomatic architect of the post-1815 order, once opined that the American polity set “altar against altar” and represented an abiding insult to time-tested Old World institutions.7 The Catholic Church, a pillar of the Restoration era, viewed the American experiment through the lenses of the French Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento, both judged to loose anarchy upon the world and drown the ceremony of innocence. When Félicité de Lemannais, a Catholic champion of religious liberty, made his famous appeal to Rome in 1832, he brought to the pope’s attention the example of the constitutional freedoms of the United States, suggesting that modern freedoms and true religion need not be sworn enemies. The pope, Gregory XVI, was not impressed. In Mirari vos (1832), the encyclical rebutting Lammenais, the pope condemned religious liberty, defining it as the error “indifferentism.” From “this most foul font of indifferentism,” the pope wrote, “flows that absurd and erroneous teaching, or rather that folly [deliramentum] that it is necessary to assure and guarantee to whomever it may be the liberty of conscience.”8
6
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Knopf, 1945) 319.
7
Noted in Günter Moltmann, “Deutscher Antiamerikanismus heute und früher,” Vom Sinn der Geschichte, ed. Otmar Franz (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976) 92.
8 Quoted
in John Noonan, The Church that Can and Cannot Change (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) 148.
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The Catholic Church not only regarded the American experiment as deficient in its assertion of religious freedom. As a nation founded by Calvinist separatists and harboring numerous Protestant emigrants from Europe, the United States represented for some the land where the principles of the Reformation would be reduced to absurdity. Not surprisingly, ultramontane Catholics were keen to call attention to the proliferation of Protestant sects in the United States, depicting the new nation as a grand bedlam of religious schism and theological charlatanism. For example, the entry on America in a Catholic encyclopedia (1854) depicts the United States as a land of bizarre religious enthusiasms; the authors even list one non-existent sect alleged to require its members to pluck out their right eye in literal interpretation of the biblical passage in Matthew 5:29!9 In his History of Modern Protestantism (1858), the Catholic scholar Joseph Edmund Jörg portrayed American society as floundering in “chaos,” resulting from the “religious individualism” and “sectarian spirit” of Protestantism.10 La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit publication founded in Naples in 1850, emerged as a leading organ of ultramontane opinion, often exhibiting a pointedly anti-American slant. An article from 1860, “Mormonism in its Connections with Modern Protestantism,” penned by Cardinal Archbishop Karl August von Reisach (1800–69), is an apt case in point. The success of Mormonism in the United States had long been a source of bewilderment to Europe’s traditionalist imagination. In Reisach’s interpretation, Mormonism’s rise amounted to an indictment of Protestant “religious individualism,” to which the American republic had given free reign. He traced the malady of American Protestantism back to colonial New England. Trying to govern society theocratically “in a state of total reliance on the Bible,” Puritans were ultimately unable to limit individuals from interpreting the Bible for themselves and “thus the same foundational principle of the Reformation naturally and necessarily caused the collapse of such a theocratic system and caused new sects and religious societies to emerge.”11 The proliferation of sects in the nineteenth century gave rise to conditions of religious confusion, allowing Mormonism fertile ground to take root and, at least for many, to pass itself off as the one true way, a safe passage from sectarianism and individualism to a secure collective and religious certainty. But in Reisach’s view, Mormonism itself represented simply a sect writ large, a symptom of American Protestantism, not its cure, and thereby a powerful, inadvertent witness for the Catholic Church as the authentic bulwark of religious truth and social cohesion.
9
See the entry on “America” in volume 9 of Kirchen-Lexikon: oder, Encyklopædie der katholischen Theologie und ihrer Hilfswissenschaften, ed. Heinrich Joseph Wetzer and Benedikt Welte (Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Herder, 1854).
10 J.
E. Jörg, Geschichte des Protestantismus in seiner neuesten Entwicklung, vol. 2 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder’sche Verhandlung, 1858) 457.
11 “Il Mormonismo nelle sue attinenze col moderno Protestantismo,” La Civiltà Cattolica 6 (19 May 1860):
394. I thank Mark Noll for calling my attention to this article.
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European Catholic misgivings about the American polity continued apace during the pontificates of Pius IX (r. 1846–78) and Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903), arguably reaching a high watermark in the latter’s encyclical Testem benevolentiae (1899), which condemned the so-called heresy of “Americanism” (to my knowledge, the only time a national identity has ever been associated with a heresy).12 The complex background to this papal condemnation found its center …the hurly-burly pluralistic of gravity in debates about American freedom and ecclesiethos of American religious astical order. Many European clergy, particularly those in France, worried that their counterparts in the United States life…elicited a skeptical, had succumbed to the American environment of “indiffercondescending attitude… entism,” in that some had advocated a church remodeled along liberal democratic lines. Other clergy even equated “Americanism” with the degenerate spirit of modern times itself.13 In Leo XIII’s encyclical, European clergy got what they wanted, even if in a much less alarmist voice: a warning against the “Americanist” heresy. The events surrounding this controversy negatively colored Catholic attitudes toward America until a time when Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray—not to mention Vatican II’s epochal Declaration on Religious Freedom (1965)—allowed for a more positive estimation of the United States. The Catholic Church, of course, had no monopoly on anti-American sentiment in the nineteenth century. For anyone—Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, or Reformed—who took Europe’s state-church system to be the proper state of things, the hurly-burly pluralistic ethos of American religious life, with its revivals, camp meetings, and itinerant preachers, elicited a skeptical, condescending attitude, if not one of bemusement and ridicule. The Anglicans Frances Trollope and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce exhibited such attitudes. After traveling throughout the United States and residing for several years in Ohio, Trollope published (in London) The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Her portrait of America as a nation of revivalist zealots and as a people lacking in social refinement became a top seller in British literary circles. One cannot remain long in the United States, she observed, “without being struck with the strange anomalies produced by its religious system…. The whole people appear to be divided into an almost endless variety of religious factions.”14
12 See
Testem benevolentiae nostrae, “Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, with Regard to Americanism,” encyclical of Pope Leo XIII (12 January 1899).
13 Abbé
Henry Delassus, L’Américanisme et la conjuration antichrétienne (Paris: Société de Saint-Augustin, Desclée De Brouwer et Cie, 1899).
14 Frances Trollope,
Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Penguin, 1997) 84.
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Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford reached a comparable conclusion in his history of the Episcopal Church in the United States. “Every fantastic opinion that has disturbed the peace of Christendom,” he wrote, “has been reproduced in stranger growth on the other side of the Atlantic. Division has grown up in all its rankness, and seeded on every side a new crop of errors.”15 This reality, he feared, threatened to produce a generation of theologically illiterate and schismatic individuals who in turn would “obliterate civilization.”16 He found a modicum of comfort in that this uncivilized anarchy existed at a safe distance from the gothic tranquility of Oxford, in the far reaches of the American frontier. Concerns about religious anarchy easily passed over into broadsides against American culture and society generally. political opportunities In his American Notes (1842), based on extensive travels in the United States, Charles Dickens wondered how in America were rarely the lack of an established church might have contributed gainsaid, Continental religious deleteriously to American society, which he viewed as a cauldron of mob passions in politics, libel in the press, leaders were less sanguine and swindling in business. The American Revolution about the effects of American had produced “a degenerate child,” he concluded, driving the point home in The Life and Adventures of Martin society on Old World religion Chuzzlewit (1843), a 700-page novel-cum-anti-American and culture… polemic.17 Dickens’ disparaging musings on America, far from standing alone, fit a larger pattern of derisory commentary on the United States by eminent visitors from Victorian Britain. Another revealing example is Matthew Arnold’s Civilization in the United States (1888), in which the apostle of high learning portrayed the United States as a country of Philistines given to ignoble pursuits, in possession of “a defective type of religion.”18
While the economic and
In Continental Europe, leaders of Lutheran and Reformed communities regularly expressed puzzlement at the religious free-for-all of the upstart nation. While the economic and political opportunities in America were rarely gainsaid, Continental religious leaders were less sanguine about the effects of American society on Old World religion and culture, being transplanted across the Atlantic by waves of German immigrants during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Philip Schaff, a Swiss-German Reformed émigré theologian, worried, for example, that the church in America (his
15 Samuel
Wilberforce, A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America (New York: Standford and Swords, 1849) 290–1.
16 Wilberforce 17 Charles
291.
Dickens, American Notes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842) 141.
18 Matthew
Arnold, Civilization in the United States, 6th ed. (Boston: DeWolfe, Friske, 1900), 140. For additional Victorian-era criticisms of America, see Benjamin Evans Lippincott, Victorian Critics of Democracy (New York: Octagon, 1974).
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adopted home) lacked a principle of authority and mechanism toward unity and thus appeared destined for a career of fissiparous, obscurantist ignominy: Tendencies, which had found no political room to unfold themselves in other lands, wrought here without restraint.... Every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure. What is to come of such confusion is not now to be seen.19 Less devout German-speaking intellectuals also expressed their misgivings about the United States. Among them, arguably none was more influential than G. W. F. Hegel. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, America occupies a marginal position. Hegel’s famous division of the world into “three distinct world-outlooks”—Oriental, Greco-Roman, and the Germanic—made no place for the indigenous peoples of the New World, and he dismissed the culture of the U.S. as derivative from Europe and ultimately of negligible importance. “America,” he wrote, “has severed itself from the ground that world’s history has taken place until now. What has taken place in America so far is a mere echo of the Old World, and the expression of an alien vitality.”20 To be sure, Hegel admitted that America might represent “the land of the future,” “the land of longing for all those who are weary of the historic arsenal that is old Europe.”21 Even so, this land of longing presented for him a problem, particularly in the religious sphere. While dismissive of traditional, creedal Christianity, Hegel was supportive of the Prussian state church and the Ministry of Culture, which had secured for him his influential post at the University of Berlin. To his mind, America constituted a deficiency insofar as it lacked a strong state and a European-style ministry of culture, which, among other things, served to check popular religious enthusiasm. From the august Prussian capital, society across the Atlantic appeared to him a hatchery of religious misfits, isolated from the truly important currents of world history. The United States is the land of “every sort of capriciousness,” he wrote, This explains the proliferation of sects to the point of sheer madness…. This total arbitrariness is such that the various communities hire and fire ministers as they please: the church is not something that [has]…an external establishment; instead, religious matters are handled according to the particular views of the congregation. In North America, the wildest freedom of imagination prevails.22
19 Philip
Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism, trans. John Nevin (Chambersburg: Publication of the German Reformed Church, 1845) 149–50.
20 G.
W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) 114.
21 Hegel
114.
22 Hegel
112–3.
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Such derisory preoccupation with religion and culture in the United States enjoyed a long life in modern Continental thought—a minor, if not a major, note in the thought of numerous intellectuals influenced by Hegel. Yet it was arguably in Hegel’s own stomping grounds, the “mandarin” guilds of the German university system in the late nineteenth century, that anti-American sentiment in general and contempt of American religious life in particular, attained a stage of true virtuosity. Although no haven of religious orthodoxy, fin de siècle German academic culture, as Fritz Ringer has persuasively argued, constituted a spiritual aristocracy of sorts, empowered by ideals of cultural organicism, criticism of democracy, and an ethos of daunting academic accomplishment. Scholars felt their collective worldview best preserved the genuine spiritual values necessary for a deep and rich culture (Kultur), one capable of producing a Goethe, Schiller, or Kant. By contrast, “Western” countries, and America foremost, represented a utilitarian, shallow, mass civilization (Zivilization) that threatened to place all “spiritual” (geistige) motivations and actions into the maw of purely individualistic, commercial interests. “The [Anglo-American] trader,” wrote Werner Sombart after the outbreak of World War I, “regards the whole existence of man on earth as a sum of commercial transactions which everyone makes as favorably as possible for himself, whether with fate or God,” adding that “the trader’s spirit molds religions in its own image too.”23 One finds similar sentiments in the writings of a wide spectrum of thinkers, such as Oswald Spengler, Adolf von Harnack, Emil Dubois Reymond, and Eduard Spranger. The “breathless haste” of the American, Friedrich Nietzsche had written, precociously capturing a widespread fear, “is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality [Geistiglosigkeit] like a blanket.”24 Max Weber’s well-known writings on American religious life reflect his milieu. While he was less politically illiberal and anti-American than many of his peers, his writings on the “sect spirit” in American society bear witness to a distinctly pre-democratic, European disquiet toward the United States. In the famous final passages of his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the only nation Weber mentions by name is the United States, the site of capitalism’s “highest development,” before wondering who will live in this “iron cage” of the future, this site of “mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive sense of self-importance.” 25 In a shorter essay, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” written after visiting the United States in 1904, Weber expressed amazement at the high levels of church affiliation in the United States despite the severance of church-state ties. The transference of religion from the public to the private sphere helped account for the voluntary and “ascetic” character of
23 Quoted
in Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) 183.
24 Friedrich
258–9.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974)
25 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s,
1958) 181 and following.
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American churches. But, in his interpretation, this asceticism only helped “put a halo around the economic ‘individualist’ impulses of the modern capitalist ethos.”26 The German mandarin depiction of America as a religiously deformed, economically utilitarian, and culturally shallow civilization arguably reached its apogee in the writings of Martin Heidegger and in his highly symbolic conception of America—or Americanism—as a site of cultural catastrophe. In many respects, Heidegger is a pivotal and revealing figure in the story of European anti-Americanism. Growing up in provincial Baden in southwestern Germany and once a devoted student of Catholic theology (he sought to become a Jesuit as a young man), Heidegger had deep roots in a rural, pre-democratic conservative religious milieu. The ponderous anti-modern, anti-technological outlook that he developed—in, for instance, An Introduction to Metaphysics—has exerted an estimable influence on the European left: on the existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir and their successors; on the 1960s counterculture generally; and, not least, on leaders within Germany’s Green Party, the gold standard of contemporary leftist anti-Americanism. One also thinks of subsequent au courant thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man) and Jean Baudrillard (America), whose influence in the modern academy, on both sides of the Atlantic, has been considerable and in whose writings the Heideggerian image of “the American” as a history-less “mass man” or “collective man,” holding desperately to a simple and irrational faith, emerges as an article of certainty.27 But we should not forget Heidegger himself in considering his influence. Germany, he wrote in 1935, two years after the Nazis had seized power, “lies today in a great pincer, squeezed by Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, with the same dreary technological frenzy and the same unrestricted organization of the average mind.”28 But in 1942, as the Holocaust was underway, he would write that Americanism is the purest and most problematic form of modernity. “Bolshevism is only a variant of Americanism...” he wrote, “the most dangerous shape of boundlessness, because it appears in the form of a democratic middle-class way of life mixed with Christianity, and all this in an atmosphere devoid of any sense of history.”29 “Americanism,” as he put it in yet another formulation, “is the still unfolding and not yet full or completed metaphysical essence of the emerging monstrousness of modern times.”30
26 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946) 322.
27 See
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1991) and Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (Lodon: Verso, 1988). Compare with James W. Ceasar, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 190.
28 Martin
Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 40 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975) 40–1.
29 Heidegger, 30 Martin
“Hölderlins Hymne,” in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 53 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975) 86.
Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittoria Klostermann, 1957) 103; quoted in Ceasar 9.
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To be sure, “anti-Americanism” is a diffuse and complicated phenomenon, polygenetic in its origins, protean in its manifestations, and diverse in possible interpretations. But, at a minimum, it is inaccurate and simplistic to regard it as a product of “the European left,” a secularist, progressive mindset passing judgment on a more religious, conservative one. The deepest historical currents of anti-American sentiment vis-à-vis religion derive from the traditionalist, political right, from “the throne and altar” milieu of reactionary, post-1815 Europe. This particular form of anti-modern conservatism— one of established churches, social hierarchy, and cultural organicism, often expressed by aggrieved aristocrats, bishops, clergy, and professors—is quite foreign to American political thought, with the partial exception of Southern Agrarianism. And in Europe today this tradition is vestigial at best (and should not be confused with more recent nationalist and anti-immigrant right-wing voices). Even so, passionate moods of being and thought perish reluctantly in history, especially when the truth of religion and the social order is at stake; more often they live on in transmuted, residual, and unexpected ways. A longer treatment would be necessary to establish this point definitively, but one can reasonably conjecture that a rather venerable Tory condescension and contempt of New World religiosity prowls about today ghost-like in the general (secular) European body politic and historical consciousness, an embedded element of cultural memory. In the final analysis, European anti-Americanism includes a significant, if often obscured, religious dimension. One cannot properly understand its deep-seated hold on the imagination if the scope of inquiry is limited to recent history and the domains of politics, economics, and diplomacy. And it certainly transcends much-discussed single issues, such as transatlantic differences of opinion over the death penalty, the penal system, the welfare state, or the war on terror. Indeed, much deeper cultural and religious forces come into play, and this requires more penetrating historical analysis, which in turn might take one to some rather unlikely places and periods. To be sure, intellectuals such as Habermas, Derrida, and Vattimo might have important and valid grievances with the directions of the current administration; and these deserve open and fair discussion in the media and political arena. But their efforts—and those of many others—to insinuate a link between contemporary policy and America’s general religious identity might, finally, tell us as much about European attitudes toward America as about America itself. These attitudes and the long history of concerns, perceptions, and anxieties informing them deserve more attention from students of transatlantic relations.
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Islam in the West or Western Islam? The Disconnect of Religion and Culture1 Olivier Roy
T
he definitive presence of a huge Muslim population in Europe will, of course, have long-term consequences. There is, nevertheless, some debate about the figures of the Muslim population, partly due to imprecise data, partly due to the difficulty of knowing who qualifies as a Muslim. Is one defined as a Muslim strictly because of one’s choice to belong to that religious community, or is one a Muslim by ethnic background? Beyond the demographic aspect, the fact that Islam is taking hold in Europe seems to put into question European identity. It is clear that the rejection of Turkey’s European Union candidature by European public opinion is largely linked to the fact that Turkey is a Muslim country. Furthermore, the assassination of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh seems to have played a role in the Dutch rejection of the European Constitution in May 2005. What does the rise of Islam in Europe entail in terms of shared culture and values? Should we speak of “Islam in the West” as if Islam were the bridgehead of a different culture area, or of “Western Islam” as if a European Islam should necessarily differ from its Middle Eastern or Asian versions? Since the late 1970s, when it became clear that the bulk of incoming immigrants would stay in Europe, two models have shaped Western European countries’ immigration policies. The first model is called “multiculturalism” and is dominant in Northern Europe; the second one is “assimilationism” and has been advocated by a broad spectrum of
1
This paper was first presented at the conference “Religion, Secularism, and the End of the West,” held by the Center on Religion and Democracy and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Laxenburg/ Vienna, Austria, on June 3, 2005.
Olivier Roy is Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Lecturer at both the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. He is the author of numerous books, including The Failure of Political Islam (1996), The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (2000), and Globalized Islam: The Search for the New Ummah (2004).
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political forces in France. This last model—an exception in a generally multiculturalist Europe—possesses new appeal for Northern European countries (Belgium, Holland, and Denmark). Both models presuppose what is perceived as a national and/or Western identity, which, for the multiculturalist approach, should coexist with other cultures. However, the assimilationist perspective assumes that the “Western” model is universal and could integrate people from various cultural backgrounds on the condition that they give up former identities. At the end of the 1990s, however, both models were widely seen as having failed, which led to an unprectherefore, entails a disconnect of edented convergence between the different European countries. Countries that did not consider themselves religious markers from immigration societies (Italy and Spain) realized recentcultural content. ly that, in fact, they have actually acquired a permanent Muslim population—and this is a realization that Eastern European countries will soon be having. This convergence demands a European approach to the question of what Islam in Europe means. The same issue is, it should be noted, addressed by some Islamic institutions in Europe (The European Council of Fatwa, based in London, for instance).
Contemporary fundamentalism,
The model of multiculturalism failed not because of the “multi” but because of the “culturalism.” The underlying idea was that a religion is embedded into a culture (or that any culture is based on a religion). Religious believers form a community with its own customs, social fabric, diet, and so on, and community leaders who maintain some sort of social control on the community. To share a faith means to share a common culture. Such self-regulation through community leaders is portrayed in an old story from Holland, in which the Jews expulsed from Spain and Portugal around 1600 were granted asylum and offered hospitality, but asked to regulate their own community themselves. The French assimilationist model failed because it initially ignored the religious dimension of immigrants’ identities, or more exactly, because it presupposed that this dimension would fade away during the process of integration. The underlying policy was to integrate the Muslims the way the Jews had been integrated in the wake of the French Revolution: to grant them “nothing as a community (nation), everything as individual citizens.” But the rise of different forms of Islamic religious revival among integrated immigrants pushed the government to acknowledge the existence of a (supposedly) purely religious community (hence the creation by the state of a religious body, the French Council of Muslim Faith, in 2002, which is in itself a break from the Republican secular policy of laïcité). It is clear that the way the different European countries have defined their relations with immigrants is deeply rooted in their own history and political culture. But national identities are in crisis at two levels: from above, due to European integration (which 128
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has nothing to do with Islam), and from below, due to the crisis of the “social bind” in destitute neighborhoods (in France) or big city centers (in Holland), and the inability of the school system to cope with these areas of social exclusion. Clearly, the focus on Islam is, wrongly or rightly, a focus on national and/or European identity. In fact, both immigration models have failed because they have been unable to acknowledge and deal with what is at the root of the present forms of religious revivalism: the disconnect between religion and culture. Religious fundamentalism among Muslims in the West is not a consequence of the importation of a given original culture into the West, but of the deculturation of Islam. Pristine cultures like Islam are in crisis, as immigration changes the relation between migrants and the original culture. Second and third generations tend to prefer the language of the guest country over that of their parents’ home country, and they tend to speak better French than Arabic (when they speak Arabic at all), English than Urdu, and even, but far more slowly, German than Turkish. Youth tend to adopt Western urban youth sub-culture (in terms of dress, slang, music, etc.). Fast food is more popular than traditional cuisine. Moreover, fundamentalism is itself a tool of deculturation. The Saudi Wahhabis reject anything close to a “traditional” culture; they banned music, dance, novels, and non-religious poetry. The Taliban in Afghanistan did not fight against Western influence but against the traditional Afghan culture (banning music, kite-flying, singing birds, etc.). Such a rejection of the very concept of culture appeals to a youth who feels often culturally alienated, even if socially well-integrated. Van Gogh’s killer in Holland spoke better Dutch than Arabic and was not reacting to the Middle Eastern conflict or to Muslim culture. He became outraged at what he saw as blasphemy against Islam in a purely Western context. Contemporary fundamentalism, therefore, entails a disconnect of religious markers from cultural content. For instance, “hallal ” does not refer only to a traditional cuisine but describes any cuisine; hence, the flourishing of hallal fast-food restaurants among born-again Muslims in the West, but few Moroccan or Turkish traditional restaurants. This disconnect means that the issue is not a clash of cultures between West and East but the recasting of faith into what is seen as a “pure” religion based on isolated religious markers. The issue for European societies is, then, how to deal with such a surge of religious identities at a time when secularization is seen as a prerequisite for democracy and modernity. It is an often expressed idea that the Westernization of Islam should mean the reformation of Islam. A superficial understanding of Max Weber, who has often been misread, leads to the conclusion that the modernity of a religion has to do with its theological dogma. Because it supposedly does not differentiate between religion and politics, Islam is deemed incompatible with secularization and democracy, as long as it does not undergo a deep theological reform. Such a reasoning ignores the fact that Roman Catholicism never underwent a deep theological reformation (because it would have meant the triumph of Protestantism) but, nevertheless, has been able to adapt reluctantly to modernism. Of course, there are “liberal” Muslim theologians who advocate 129
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some sort of reformation. But, for me, this is not a prerequisite for Westernization. In fact, Westernization is already at work, specifically in the more fundamentalist forms of religious expression, for two reasons. First, fundamentalism entails a clear delinking of religion and culture. And second, the new forms of religiosity are “transversal,” which is common to Islam and Christianity. What is at stake is not religion (a set of dogma and rituals), but religiosity (the relationship between a believer and religion). Even if the dogmas differ, we find common forms of religiosity that explain the religious nomadism of our time (people going from religion to religion while claiming to look for the same thing). The present forms of religiosity are based on the same patterns. There is a stress on the individual, coupled with the crisis of religious institutions. Immediate access to the “truth” is promised through faith, at the expense of studies. A contempt of history, tradition, philosophy, and literature develops, as favor for a direct, personal, emotional form of religious feeling takes precedence. And the religious community is defined not as an already existing body (church or ummah), but as a reconstructed community of the “chosen” by individuals. The “community” lives both in and apart from the existing society. The space of the ummah is no longer a territorial one, implying a political leadership, with a nation-state and borders. In fact, most of the neo-fundamentalist movements, including the most radical ones, stopped discussing the “dar ul islam” (abode of Islam) in territorial terms. They consider the ummah to be everywhere Muslims are to be found. An interesting case is that of Hizb-ul-Tahrir, a radical (although not terrorist) movement now based in London, which advocates the revival of the Islamic Caliphate but simply skips the issue of its territorial basis: the Caliphate could be restored in a very short time if every Muslim decides that it exists and pledges loyalty to it. Thus, one can live both as a member of a specific minority group while also part of a universal community. This dialectic of universalism/minority is interesting because it is to be found both in Islam and Christianity. Although the great majority of Americans claim to be practicing Christians, every church speaks about living as a minority in a decadent society (as illustrated by the novel Left Behind, in which the “saved” are a minority).2 Even the Catholic Church acknowledges representing a minority in Europe and advocates closing ranks in difficult times. As much as religion tends to be disembedded from cultures, churches and congregations tend to be disembedded from mainstream society (a process clearly at work in Spain and Italy, where, until recently, Catholicism was seen as being at the core of the national culture).
2
130
Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Carol Stream: Tyndale, 1995).
I slam in the west or western islam ? / ro y
The new dilemma for many who are born again is not how to rebuild the society on Christian or Islamic principles, but how to live integrally with that society according to one’s true religious tenets. “Integralism” in this sense tends to replace “fundamentalism,” and religious revivalism does not challenge the existing political or social order. The brand of fundamentalism that is thriving among many second-generation Muslim immigrants in the West is a paradoxical consequence of their own Westernization, which means first deculturation and then the recasting of Islam as a “mere” religion. Yet the same phenomena of deculturation and recasting could take different forms, such as “liberal,” “mystical,” or “conservative ethical” Islam. “Liberal Islam” means delinking the religious meaning of …many Muslims in the West the Koran and the Sunnah from its socio-cultural and hisare recasting their religious torical context. Historically, it could be said that Islam was a progression in terms of women’s conditions, compared norms in terms of Westernto the previous period (jahiliyya or “ignorance”), but that compatible values, but not it nevertheless had to take into account the customs of the time (for example, allowing polygamy without recomnecessarily on the liberal side. mending it). If one comes back to the true spirit of the text, then, men and women should be considered equal. The same argument is used about the prohibition of alcohol: alcohol was banned because people were unable to drink moderately and thus became drunk at prayer time, but if one can drink without becoming drunk, then alcohol is permitted. Whatever the religious validity of such assertions, they clearly contribute to making Islam Westerncompatible. It should be noted, however, that such a view is not dominant by definition among those who are born again and represents more the “lazy” discourse of secular or seldom-practicing Muslims when they are asked to explain their behavior. Mystical Islam is linked with the burgeoning of Sufi orders. These brotherhoods, whether traditional or reconstructed, are wide open to converts, once again blurring the divide between West and East. Islamic Sufism fits here with the spread of New Age religious communities and cults in the West. Conservative ethical Islam is probably the dominant trend among practicing Muslims, who could be compared to Orthodox Jews. The basic norms are taken into account, especially the diet norms: eating hallal and fasting during Ramadan, for instance.3 But beside this normative dimension, norms tend to be recast into values on the model of conservative Christianity. For example, Holland. When Pym Fortuyn entered into politics, it was to protest the declarations of a Dutch-speaking Moroccan Imam who called homosexuals “sick people” and refused to grant them any rights as a minority
3
The fast of Ramadan is, according to polls, the most respected religious norm among French Muslims, even before daily prayer.
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group. Fortuyn, however, was not acting in the name of traditional Western values but in defense of the “sexual liberation” movement of the 1960s, which is largely seen by many conservative Christians as the collapse of a society based on values and principles. Interestingly enough, many Muslims in the West are recasting their religious norms in terms of Western-compatible values, but not necessarily on the liberal side. They tend, for instance, to support the anti-abortion campaign, while abortion has never been a central issue in Muslim societies (it is usually condemned, but the ban on abortion has never really been enforced). The debate in the West is not between Islamic and Western values, but within the West: What are Western values? Where is the divide between human freedom and nature (or God)? In fact, Islam is the mirror in which Europe is looking at its own identity, but it does not offer a new culture or new values. It expresses itself inside the present debate on religious revivalism and secularism—but as part of the debate, not its cause.
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Secularization, European Identity, and “The End of the West”1 Slavica Jakelić
I
f Europe is so uniquely secularized—as most scholars of religion, Western European intellectuals, and U.S. conservatives seem to agree—why is its secular character so widely and vigorously debated in the legal and political context of European integration, in the institutions of the European Union and those of the current (and future) Union members? Many disputes and disagreements surrounded the mentioning of the Christian heritage in the constitution of the European Union, the French decision about the wearing of foulards, and the debates about the public role of religions in the Netherlands, Poland, or Italy. For anyone watching—social scientists in particular—the right thing to do is not to reiterate the too often repeated arguments about European uniqueness but to ask: why are discussions about public religions and affirmations of European secular heritage happening precisely now? This question is the point of departure for a correlation I want to draw between the insistence on the secular character of Europe, the diversification of the European religious context, the struggle to define the symbolic foundations of European identity, and the positing of America as Europe’s Other. The usual way to understand the “Europe versus America” phenomenon is to contextualize it in the end of the Cold War era; to explain its source as the rise of religious conservativism in the U.S., politically affirmed in the Bush administration; or to point out that Europe is undergoing a serious and
1
I am grateful to Charles Mathewes, Jason Varsoke, and Joshua Yates for reading and commenting on this essay.
Slavica Jakelić is Associate Director of the Center on Religion and Democracy and Lecturer at the University of Virginia. Her work focuses on religion, identity, and social change. She is co-editor of Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia (2003) and The Future of the Study of Religion (2004), and is presently working on a book entitled Religion as Identity: The Challenge of Collectivistic Religions in the Contemporary World.
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often disquieting quest for its geo-political and cultural boundaries. 2 The focus here is different: the goal is to understand the place of religion within today’s European cultural and political currents, as these factors particularly shape “the end of the West thesis” and, moreover, the paradox bound up in this thesis. The current context of the European Union, by which it is greatly defined as an economic and political entity, is that of integration, enlargement, and immigration. What comes out of these processes that bring together countries as distant and as different as Lithuania, France, and Malta, and introduce into the heart of Western European cities immigrants from Africa and Asia, is a crisis of European collective self-understanding. During the first decades of the existence of some form of European integration processes, economic rationale had been a dominant and, it seemed, sufficient rationale for these processes. In post-World War II Europe, the prevalent view was that economic cooperation guaranteed peace. But during the last several years, more and more voices have expressed a serious worry that economy and market cannot be the foundation for solidarity among different European peoples. Discussing these questions, the working group of intellectuals and politicians organized around the Vienna Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, initiated by a former president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, concluded that “markets cannot produce a politically resilient solidarity” that would result in “a genuine sense of civic community.”3 The main concern of European intellectual and political elites has become the determination of the features—boundaries and characteristics—of European identity. To paraphrase T. G. Ash, while the Americans are asking “What are we to do with who we are?” Europeans are still asking “Who are we?” The European identity is anything but defined, and steps toward definition are multiple and range widely—from a view of European identity as a new national identity,4 to an attempt to define European identity as a cultural identity,5 or as “something” that has been and will remain, to be defined by “unity in plurality.” In this context, where the definition of what it means to be European is at stake, the religious processes that define the everyday life of Europeans and the political discourse negotiating the proper place of religion in European societies are not the homogenizing forces that can provide the foundation for what it means to
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2
For a recent succinct statement of the contextual variables surrounding the twenty-first-century notion of the crisis of the West, see Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (New York: Random House, 2004).
3
For the report of this working group, see IWM Newsletter no. 4 (Fall 2004): 86.
4
See the statement of the former French finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who, upon watching the demonstrations against Bush’s war in Iraq all over Europe, declared: “On Saturday, February 15, a new nation was born on the street. This new nation is the European nation” (Ash 46).
5
For a critique of the possibility of creating European cultural identity from different national cultures and for a notion that the elements of “European” identity are only aspects of modernity, see Agnes Heller, “Europe: An Epilogue,” The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity, ed. Brian Nelson, David Roberts, and Walter Veit (New York: Berg, 1992).
S E C U L A R I Z A T I O N , european identit y , and “ the end of the west ” / J akeli Ć
be European. Within the processes of integration, enlargement, and immigration in Europe, contemporary religious developments lead not toward a unified secular destination—as many Western Europeans would like to believe and religious scholars still prophesy—but into a religious diversification; not toward a new collective effervescence, but toward new divisions. The first and oldest component of European religious …the contemporary religious pluralism is the difference in the levels and character of developments lead not religiosity between Catholic and Protestant countries. As studies clearly point out, the level of religious practices is toward a unified secular much higher in Catholic Italy, Spain, and Ireland than in destination…but into a historically Protestant Netherlands and Great Britain.6 A second component is the emergence of new religious movereligious diversification… ments with their individualistic character and “here-andnow” spirituality.7 Both components are indigenous to the European West. The Catholic-Protestant difference was the hallmark of European religious history, while new religious movements are perceived by some as the result of secularization, since the spiritual revivals that embody the sacralization of life and the self are highly individualized and de-institutionalized religious expressions. But neither the argument about Catholic-Protestant difference nor suggestions about the spiritual revival of Western Europeans seriously challenge the dominant narrative of progressive secularization within the European world. Two other processes do, however. The first phenomenon that is changing the European religious scene is Islam. As many commentators point out, it is impossible to overemphasize the general cultural and political impact, and the specifically religious impact, that the public presence of Muslim believers is already generating and will continue to generate in European societies. Currently, there are more than ten million Muslims in Western Europe.8 This number can only grow in coming decades, especially as new countries such as Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania approach the Union. With Turkey in the European Union, the number of Muslims within European borders would increase by more than sixty million. The other major, yet much less discussed, phenomenon that adds to the diversification of the European religious scene is that of collectivistic Christianities. “Christian
6
See Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 11.
7
See Paul Heelas, “Detraditionalizing the Study of Religion,” The Future of the Study of Religion, ed. Slavica Jakelić and Lori Pearson (Leiden: Brill, 2004) 251–73. See also Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
8
See Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper, eds., Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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identity” usually denotes an identity that crosses ethnic, gender, national, and class boundaries, an identity that links the individual into a universal community of salvation. However, and perhaps counter-intuitively, Christianity also developed many collectivistic traditions. It is too often forgotten that in a number of cases Christianity is constitutive, often the constitutive, element of people’s collective memory. In Orthodox Christian churches—in Bulgarian, Russian, or Serbian Orthodox churches, to name a few—the church as an institution and Christianity as a religious tradition have been distinctively embedded in vernacular liturgy since medieval times. Institutionally and symbolically often inseparable from the political establishment, these Christian churches are, and have long been, focal in defining the boundaries of the collective identities of Bulgarians, Russians, and Serbs. One can recognize collectivistic religions in the institutional and historical applications of Roman Catholicism discussed, phenomenon that as well, although the Roman Catholic Church explicitly understands itself as a universal church. Collectivistic adds to the diversification Catholicisms are not simply grounded in the localization of the European religious of universal meanings or the localization of rituals, processes that happen with Christianity all the time. Rather, scene is that of collectivistic collectivistic Catholicisms are religious traditions and Christianities. institutions that developed under very specific historical contexts—such as in Poland, Ireland, or Croatia—domesticating themselves most evidently with regard to the existence of a religious other.9 While different in the extent of their institutional sovereignty, all collectivistic Christianities have in common historically embedded meanings of Christianity.10 To be Serbian has for centuries meant to be an Orthodox Christian, and vice versa; to be Polish has meant to be a Catholic. Put differently, the key aspect of collectivistic Christianites is belonging shaped by religious identification that is ascribed to individuals rather than chosen by them, and experienced as fixed rather than as changeable. This type of identity gives to the collectivistic Christian communities the primary meaning of primordial and only secondary meaning of universal communities of salvation.
The other major, yet much less
The collectivistic Christianities described above are now represented in the European Union by ten million Greek Orthodox believers and thirty-eight million Polish Catholics. Before long, collectivistic Christianities will be represented by an additional seven million Bulgarian Orthodox Christians, about twenty-one million Romanian Orthodox
9
For a discussion of the Polish case and its specific historical context, see José Casanova, “Catholic Poland in Post-Christian Europe,” Tr@nsit online 25 (2003) <www.iwm.at/index.php?option=com_content&ta sk=view&id=239&Itemid=415>. For a discussion of the historical context of Croatian Catholicism, see Slavica Jakelić, Religion as Identity, unpublished manuscript.
10 The
Eastern Orthodox collectivistic Christianities are autocephalous national churches, while the Catholic Churches belong under the jurisdiction of the Pope.
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Christians, and four million Roman Catholic Croats. Students of religion usually perceive these Christianities as something that connects the Old and New Europe—not as something that further complicates the European religious scene. Most social scientists suggest that collectivistic Christianities are suffering the same enervation as Western European Christianity. Studies of religion and religious institutions in post-Communist societies—where collectivistic Christianities are primarily located—seem to show that the “commitment to the Church” and “the level of religious practice” are generally lower than they were during the Communist period, even “as low today as in the most secularized Western European societies.”11 In addition, social scientists regularly study collectivistic Christianities under the title of “religious nationalism.” Such a conceptualization contains an inherent assumption that Christianity is secularized because it is linked to nationalism and results in an interpretation of Christianity as epiphenomenal to nationalism.12 Due to this approach, what gets overlooked is the rootedness of a people’s collective self-understanding in Christianity and the historical processes of that collective identification that long precede the age of modern nationalisms. In order to understand that collectivistic Christianities are a significant religious force operating in Europe, and in order to understand what these Christianities may do for the European Union, one needs to appreciate their key aspect: belonging. This belonging is specific, historically embedded, and—something that collectivistic Christianities share with Islam—public. Even when this belonging is without believing, as social scientists triumphantly declare, it has a different character than in Western European Christianity: it is rarely private and it is rarely de-institutionalized. To be sure, the argument about the strength and potential of collectivistic Christianities could be relativized if one is to follow the only unquestioned paradigm that has remained from the old theory of secularization: that the march of secularization is unstoppable whenever Europe is in question. Then, the claim could be made that even if the collectivistic Christianities are now public and highly institutionalized, they will become less so when they become integrated into the European world.13 In Europe, as the argument regularly goes, secularization begins with modernization and always ultimately ends in secularization. But this thesis about European secular exceptionalism, just like the old theory of secularization, has an inherent teleological quality to it, and as such must be re-assessed in
11 See Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart quoting Irena Borowik in Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics
Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 113.
12 On the treatment of religion as an epiphenomenon, see David Martin, “The Secularization Issue: Prospect
and Retrospect,” British Journal of Sociology 42.3 (September 1991): 465–74.
13 My
thanks to Joshua Yates for pointing this out to me.
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the face of the specific historical moment.14 Today, different religious traditions—collectivistic Christianities and Islam—present a challenge to the idea of Europe as defined by Western European, post-Christian civilization and the secular foundations of contemporary European democracies. These traditions may present this challenge for very different reasons, but they nevertheless share this agenda. Both Muslims in Europe and Europe’s “new” Christians have a public character.15 They are very much the internal European religious Others. They are also numerous enough to make the establishment of secularism as a common legacy and foundation of identity for all Europeans rather difficult. And, I suspect, Muslims and these “new Christians” would want their places at the table where the elements of Europeans’ collective memory are to be defined.16 Put differently, Europeans today are making intellectual and political efforts to forge their identity by creating the symbolic and cultural foundations of their political community. The questions surrounding religion and secularism can hardly be separated from this European quest for self. Islam’s immediate presence in most European societies, as some have pointed out, makes defining Islam as Europe’s religious Other a catastrophic move.17 The “end of the West” thesis, which defines America as that Other, appears a better option. In a situation in which Europe is experiencing the diversification of its religious landscape—quite opposite to the dominant view that Europe is both secularized and secularizing—American religiousness emerges as the ideal opposite pole to Western European secularism, because it enables Europeans to reaffirm their secular identity around that opposition rather than against occurring religious pluralization. Stated succinctly, while Europeans need some Other to define themselves, they need the American Other to unify themselves. And here is the paradox related to this dominant view of European secularism, the view so constitutive of the “end of the West thesis.” In essentializing the differences between European and American religious past and present, what is being neglected are the circumstances—historical sources and structural legacies in a relationship with contemporary developments—that shape the current America’s religious Otherness. In insisting that America is the religious Other to Europe, Western European elites, religious scholars, and social scientists miss that the European religious scene today is not
14 On
the teleological feature of the secularization thesis, see Casanova.
15 Another group that constitutes Europe’s “new Christians” and that needs to be at least mentioned here is
African immigrants who, as Philip Jenkins argues, represent the future of Christianity in Western Europe; see Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Their presence in Europe supports the claim about the diversification of the European religious scene.
16 On
the relationship between religion, memory, and European identity, see Davie 2. For an important systematic discussion of this relationship, see Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
17 See
Tony Judt, “Europe vs. America,” The New York Review of Books 52.2 (10 February 2005) <www. nybooks.com/articles/17726>.
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very different from that of America. It is much less secular than many think, and it is increasingly pluralistic religiously. For Europeans, for their elites and their citizens, disregarding religious pluralization would be a serious misstep in fully grasping the magnitude and political implications of their own religious differences. The short-term consequence of such an oversight might be the imposition of secularism as a defining element in the identity of all Europeans, old and new. In the long run, however, the price for finding European Others in religious America and thereby affirming a secular European identity could be too high for Europe itself, since the accompanying failure to address religious differences is nothing short of dangerous for any contemporary political community, especially the one that is now being created.
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Islam in European Publics: Secularism and Religious Difference1 Nilüfer Göle
T
he European nations are witnessing unprecedented forms of encounter with Islam. The claims of new generations of migrant Muslims within European nation-states, but also the Turkish claim for membership in the European Union, raise a series of public debates, which particularly focus on the presence of Muslims in Europe, and generally address Western cultural values of democracy. Europe (meaning both European nations and the European Union) becomes a central site for this encounter. Furthermore, the Europe-based controversies have spread into other publics and provoked conflicts at a global scale. The cartoon controversy, for example— the publication of cartoons on Islam and the Prophet in a Danish right-wing newspaper created a debate on the relation between freedom of expression and religious tolerance at the European scale, but provoked anger and protestation in the Middle East, expanding the debate to other Muslim publics, including Indonesia and Pakistan. The “old” Europe is being transformed by its encounter with contemporary Islam—an Islam that is reappropriated, interpreted, and revitalized in political and cultural terms by a new generation of Muslim actors. I am not, therefore, referring to Islam as a distinct and separate civilization, but as an idiom that provides a source for the redefinition of collective identity and self-affirmation of Muslims in modern contexts. By Islam, I refer to the ways in which Muslims interpret and perform religious faith in their individual and collective agencies. It is most often among the members of social groups 1
This paper was adapted from a presentation at the conference “Religion, Secularism, and the End of the West,” held by the Center on Religion and Democracy and Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Laxenburg/Vienna, Austria, on June 3, 2005.
Nilüfer Göle is a professor of sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She works on the new configuration between Islam and modernity, and in particular on the emergence of new Muslim figures and practices in the public sphere. She is the author of The Forbidden Modern: Veiling and Civilization (1996) and Interpénetrations: L’Islam et l’Europe (2005).
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who have been uprooted, who have moved from little towns to urban cities, or who have crossed national frontiers and migrated to European centers to find new opportunities of work, education, and life, that we observe the return to Islam. Contemporary Islam and its revival is closely related to the social mobility of Muslim groups. Their entry into life spheres of modernity in general, and to European societies in particular, activates a political return to Islam. Consequently, contemporary Islam is the outcome of a conflictual conversation with the premises of modernity. We need to privilege the description of the zones of contact, interaction, and friction between Islam and Europe. One can rightly object to these terms, since one cannot contrast a religion to a historical and geographical entity, on the one hand, and since Muslims are co-creating Europe, on the other. Yet the terms capture the tension between the two players as their relationship is shaped and expressed publicly. The nature of relations between Islam and Europe is not that of an encounter between two distinct and separate civilizations, but on the contrary, is wrought by proximity and interaction between the two. The public sphere is the site where the two-way, transversal, and conflictual aspects of the relation between Europe and Islam take place. Islam is carried into public debates in Europe foremost by the religious claims of a new generation of Muslim migrants. Third-generation, young Muslims are distanced from their national cultures of origin and are more integrated than the previous generation into the culture of their host countries. Young Turkish migrants speak German, the Arab-origin Muslim migrants are instructed in French public schools, and both groups claim their French, German, or European citizenship. However, distancing oneself from one’s country of origin and integration into one’s host country do not necessarily imply assimilation to the cultural values of Europe. By means of reference to Islam, European Muslims of this new generation claim their religious difference as a source of self-affirmation but also as a source of social distinction and cultural confrontation with the European values of self and democracy. In making their religious difference visible to the European public eye, this newer generation engenders a series of public controversies on the place of religion and Islam in European democracies. The question of gender in particular disturbs and becomes a prominent issue of dispute in this encounter. The “headscarf issue,” carried by female members of the new generation of migrants in the French public schools, illustrates the ways in which the irruption of Islamic symbols in French public schools has triggered a nation-wide debate, not only on gender equality, but also on the French Republican notion of laïcité. The assassination of the Dutch intellectual Theo Van Gogh for a film he had produced with Hirsi Ali on Muslim women’s submission, and the debate that followed in the Netherlands, have also brought to public attention the divide between those who defend equality between the sexes, individual freedom, and liberty of expression (Van Gogh) and those who define their identity in reference to Islamic values and religious faith (Van Gogh’s assassin). In light of these examples, one can suggest that the questions raised by the presence of the immigrant Muslim population in Europe do not merely concern Muslims, but all European citizens and become part of a general and societal debate on 141
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the cultural values of democracy. In this respect, the question of immigration becomes progressively a question that is perceived and framed in terms of religion, and specifically in terms of a religious and Islamic presence in Europe. The semantic change in naming this immigrant population indicates this shift as well; rather than putting the accent on the social qualification, such as “the migrant worker,” or on the national one, such as “Turks” in Germany or “Algerians” in France, or using the more general cultural attribute, such as “Arabs,” the religious attribute “Muslims in Europe” becomes widely used, if not over-determinate. The discourse of integration therefore does not fully capture the changing nature of relations between European nations and Muslim migrants. The politics of integration supposes a predetermined frame of social institutions and public values to which the newcomers are expected to conform and assimilate. On the one hand, the established system and values are not fixed, but are in the process of being transformed by the entrance of new actors, groups, and idioms on the public scene. On the other hand, both French Republicanism and Dutch multiculturalism, as two different forms of integration, fall short of providing a successful frame for rethinking Islamic difference in European democracies. The French model of Republicanism promises equality of universal rights for individual citizens; but the voluntary secular “blindness” to religious difference and the fear of communitarian twists (seen as an Anglo-Saxon and American model to be avoided) risk leading to a politics of denial, where ethnic, cultural, and religious differences disappear, or where authoritarian attitudes towards Muslims manifest themselves. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, recognizes cultural pluralism and furthermore enhances a politics of difference, encouraging identity politics, but in the absence of a common frame of communication, interaction then turns into cultural avoidance. In this respect, both multiculturalism and universalism present two opposite sides of the same coin: both cultural avoidance and political denial end up with the relative failure of the integration of Muslims into Europe. My point here is not to engage in a debate on the issue of multiculturalism, but to introduce a reservation for those who condemn French universalism with the comfortable certainty that multiculturalism is the solution. One should recall that the two European countries that have voted against the referendum for the European constitution are France and the Netherlands. In spite of their strong traditions of Republicanism and multiculturalism, respectively, the two countries joined each other in defending their “national” cultural particularities against what they have perceived as a threat, whether it is defined as neo-liberalism, global economics, or Islamic values. However, I have to add as well that the political discourse on multiculturalism in Europe and the academic discourse of cultural relativism and postmodernity came to a halt, if not faded away altogether, in reaction to Islam, whereas Republican values and politics have seen revitalization in the French society of the last few years. Carried into the forefront of public debate in Europe not only by new claims of Muslim minority groups, but also by means of Muslim-majority Turkey’s claims for membership in the European Union, Islam enters into the public life of European countries 142
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setting a new public and political agenda. The controversy over Turkish membership in the European Union became a common preoccupation for European citizens and provoked a debate on the cultural and spiritual origins of European identity. Turkey presents herself as a secular Republican state—though she does not acknowledge a full separation between the state and religion, and attempts, on the contrary, to maintain state control over religion—and entails some commonalities with French laïcité: the principle of secularism was declared in the 1937 Constitution (compared to 1946 in France), and Turkey demonstrates a notion of laïcité (including the notion itself ) in the regulation of public life, forbidding religious symbols and organizations from public schools and institutions. Turkey’s ban of the Islamic headscarf from universities has provoked a nation-wide political debate since the post-1980 period. Turkey has been widely discussed in France—yet not in relation to secularism and Islam, but as the Other. The self-definition of Europeans needs difference to define itself against, whether this difference is defined in terms of geographic frontiers, cultural differences, or religious belief. Thus, a civilizational discord underpins the public discourse, and thereby transmits a feeling of reserve, if not reticence, in regard to Muslim Turkey’s entrance. The Turkish candidacy has been a catalyst in revitalizing the debate on Europe and its identity, ironically evoking a reminder of the tacit equation between Europe’s Christian religious heritage and values and European identity.2 The encounter between Europe and Islam calls for a critical re-examination of the coupled academic notions and their articulations that have accompanied this transformative process: European identity and project; the West and modernity; faith and identity; and lastly, laïcité and secularization.
Europe as an Identity or as a Project? Islamic difference in Europe raises a major question regarding the future and definition of the European Union. Europe is made of diverse nation-states, but the European Union aims at a transnational unity beyond the nation-states and offers a new political frame for democratic rights and freedoms. Whether Europe will be defined as a particularistic identity or as a political project becomes a crucial question; for European citizens, there is no hiatus between the two. But the presence of Muslims reveals a tension between these two notions, because the definition of Europe as a particularistic (Christian) identity does not facilitate the creation of hyphenated identities between Europe and Islam. As Europeans turn towards the defense of their identity and cultural heritage, the European project suffers in its claims for pluralism. In other words, to the extent that European heritage becomes a source for the essentialization of European identity it undermines the universalistic claims of the project. 2
This equation became more than tacit in the European Constitution debates, when reference to God and to the Christian heritage in the European Constitution was claimed by some European countries and rejected in the end by France-led secular European nations.
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The End of the West? The “end of the West” can be understood as a difficulty in identifying the project of modernity with the West. First, the fractures between the two Wests, European and American, become more apparent. Second, there is a divorce between the Western experience of modernity and its claims for universalism, namely the validity of the Western model of modernity in every cultural and historical context. The experience of modernity spread to peoples, regions, and cultures beyond the European and American context. This testifies to the success of the project, and such testimony lends itself to universal claims: modernity’s meanings will not be bound to a given particularistic religion, culture, or location. Yet the non-Western habitations of modernity are not copies of European and American models, and take different forms, twists, and interpretations. Hence, to embrace these different modernity narratives, the equation between Europe and civilization, between the West and the universal, becomes problematic; deconstruction of the Western universal is underway. In a way, the Western experience of modernity suffers from its own success. The semantic shift in the self-presentation of the West illustrates this change as well. The European experience of modernity was identified with a universal “civilization” and not with a particular culture and religion. The debate over the notions of “civilization” and “kultur” that divided the French and German peoples during the nineteenth century ended with the victory of “civilization” over “kultur.” Today, however, the way the notion of civilization is used to underline Western cultural difference makes its meaning closer to the German kultur.
Faith and Identity Religious faith has lost its institutional representative power but, as seen in younger Muslim generations, is becoming a new source for the definition of personal and collective identity. Islamic radicalism is not in continuation with religious orthodoxy, but, on the contrary, offers a new interpretation of religious texts in the light of criticism addressed to the modern world. We speak of the politicization of Islam to the extent that religious faith is turned into a public and collective identity; contemporary Islam voices a new articulation between religious faith and collective identity. We can put it the other way round as well: for a pious Muslim, religion is a matter of faith, not forcefully an identity. One is born into a given religion, and one becomes a pious person by learning norms, rituals, and traditions transmitted by family members, or by belonging to religious communities. Whereas one becomes an Islamist as a personal and collective choice—this is the politicization of Islam—one learns to become Islamic by means of a learning process and performative practices.
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Laïcité and Secularization The principle of laïcité is searching for ways of adaptation to the presence of Muslim migrants. The establishment of a representative council for the Muslim population (Conseil Français de la Culte Musulmane) marked a moment of public recognition for Islam as the second largest religion in France and a step toward creating a “French Islam.” The legislation to ban ostentatious religious signs, and in particular the headscarf from the public schools, expressed firmly the French commitment to the principle of laïcité, but also testified that the “Islamic veiling” is not confined to a Muslim nation, or to the Middle East region, but has also become an issue for the French public. The principle of laïcité and the process of secularization are not interchangeable; the first is defined in relation to state will and legislation, whereas the latter describes a long-term process of the marginalization of religion, its privatization, and the “disenchantment” of modern daily life. The principle of laïcité was thought to be a “French exceptionalism” and therefore limited in its scope, whereas the process of secularization was depicted to be a universal trait of modernization. However, religious references in the regulation of matters concerning gender, life and death, and “bio-politics”—same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering and the critique of Darwinism—all illustrate cleavages between secular and religious sets of values (Muslim as well as Christian) in shaping modern life. In the contemporary context, religion enters into the public domain and competes with the process of secularization. It might be fruitful to rethink the principle of laïcité as a single secular law, providing a consensual judicial frame in a pluralistic context. The confrontation between Islam and the West is not a confrontation between two different civilizations, or religions, but a confrontation between two different sets of cultural values, two different orientations toward modernity. Europe is becoming a central site where the conflictual encounter between these orientations, as embodied by Muslims and Europeans, is taking place, and public debates over Western definitions of self and society are intensifying. It is not in terms of two distinct entities—Islam and Europe—but in terms of zones of contact, interactions, and interpenetrations that one can frame the nature of this confrontation.3 The emergence of Islam in the European publics provokes a two-way relation that transforms not only Muslims and Europeans, but also the whole European project. Issues related to faith, religion, and secularism become decisive in debates on the values of modernity, in which we are witnessing the end of Western hegemony on the definitions of values of modernity. However, such a divorce between the West and the experience of modernity might undermine the latter as well.
3
Nilüfer Göle, Interpenetrations: l’islam et l’europe (Paris: Galaade, 2005).
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Secularization in the Global South: The Case of Ethiopia Wilson N. Brissett
While the academic debate over the validity of the theory of secularization continues in American and British universities, it must be remembered that secularization theory also exerts a very practical influence in places quite distant from the sacred halls of the Ivy League and Oxbridge. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, its influence has rarely been other than pernicious. The marriage of secularization and modernization theories in the social sciences produced a great deal of useful, if still controversial, analysis of modernity in Western societies. In the global South, however, the union served, more often than not, to legitimate authoritarian ideologies of progress that, through the militant socialism of the 1960s and 1970s, extended the destructive logic of cultural paternalism beyond the fall of the colonial regimes and into the era of de-colonization. And while socialist states in Africa and Latin America fell like dominoes through the 1990s, the toxic cultural impact of the militant socialist appropriation of secularization theory remains thick in the atmosphere. If European and North American audiences have become thoroughly aware of our complicity in the resource problems that plague the global South, we have yet to consider fully the enduring, corrosive influence of the political uses of our social science theories. The experience of Ethiopia across the twentieth century crystallizes with terrible clarity the ravages of secularization theory in the global South. Here we see how the classic theory’s guiding assumption—that the process of modernization requires a dismissal of any traditional religious commitments that do not comport with a scientific, naturalistic, enlightened worldview—opened the door to the tragic cycle of violence that dominated twentieth-century Ethiopia and shows few signs at present of receding into a more just social and political equilibrium.
Wilson N. Brissett is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Virginia and a dissertation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. His dissertation is entitled Beauty among the Puritans: The Cultural Aesthetic of Early New England. He conducted research in Ethiopia in the summer of 2005.
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© Kate Hundley, 2005
Ethiopia, dominated in the first half of the twentieth century by the personage of Emperor Haile Selassie, entered the League of Nations, and acquired the status of African golden child among the Western powers after Selassie famously abolished slavery in the 1920s. Despite advances in modern infrastructure and Western education, however, Ethiopian intellectuals became impatient with the slow pace of reform, and the Emperor’s regime was overthrown in 1974 by a self-identified Marxist-Leninist military junta, later known as the Derg. The Derg ruled the country with an iron fist and an indifference to the sanctity of life. Lamin Sanneh has shown that, in this authoritarian environment, resistance was not cheap for those who managed to maintain it: The story of what happened in Ethiopia may stand as an object lesson for all concerned. Shortly after he came to power in 1974, Mengistu Haile Mariam, styling himself after Lenin, unleashed what has come to be called the reign of Red Terror that engulfed the monarchy and the church. In 1977 and 1978 alone, the regime killed half a million people, according to reports by Amnesty International.1 The Derg was displaced in its turn in 1991 through the military collaboration of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). EPRDF became the ruling party, known as Ehadig, under
1
Lamin Sanneh, “Conclusion: The Current Transformation of Christianity,” The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 216.
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the new constitution and immediately announced a doctrine of democracy and liberalization. Despite these stated ideals, and despite once again paving Ethiopia’s way into favor with the West, Ehadig has retained its control of political power since 1991 by manipulating elections. Most recently, in June 2005, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi preserved his place at the head of state by crushing opposition protests to the tune of nearly seventy dead and hundreds imprisoned. The dominant interpretation of what went wrong in Ethiopia often focuses narrowly on problems of material circumstances—economic inequality, the seeming intractability of the configuration of global power, the need for land policy reform—to the neglect of equally significant cultural factors that address the less visible realm of moral order. This pattern holds true even within the more personal register of Nega Mezlekia’s English-language memoir, Notes from The materialist account the Hyena’s Belly, which recounts his experiences in Ethiopia of the political tragedy of during the revolutionary era.2 Mezlekia’s book is an artful narrative that weaves together traditional wisdom, Orthodox modern Ethiopia is finally ritual, and reports of historical brutality—all delivered with as insufficient in explanatory a terrible irony that seeks desperately to claim some minute comic distance from realities that otherwise threaten to power for the past as it is swallow the speaker in silence altogether.
impotent to heal the deep
If ironic distance provides one strategy for keeping existential annihilation at bay, the revelation of truth through sheer fact offers another. Mezlekia fights against the darkness by uncovering the wretched material situations that produced so much horror in revolutionary Ethiopia. Near the end of Notes, after Mezlekia has escaped to Canada, his reaction to the overthrow of the Derg indicates the helplessness Mezlekia feels in the face of history, even as he has offered compelling economic, agricultural, and political explanations of the path that led to Ethiopia’s autocratic political fate:
cultural fissures…
In 1991, the military junta that had ruled Ethiopia for over a decade was finally deposed by one of the guerrilla movements. I did not break open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion, because by then I’d realized that what had happened in Ethiopia was not exceptional. To varying degrees, it had happened all over sunny Africa, and still does.3 Mezlekia demonstrates what he is not able to articulate: the materialist account of the political tragedy of modern Ethiopia is finally as insufficient in explanatory power for the past as it is impotent to heal the deep cultural fissures that shape the current social and political morass.
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2
Nega Mezlekia, Notes from the Hyena’s Belly (New York: Picador USA, 2002).
3
Mezlekia 351.
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“Merkato” Ethiopian Konjo Collection © Marie Claire Andrea, 2005
While most commentators on this sordid history have, like Mezlekia, emphasized the material roots of Ethiopia’s troubles, Ethiopian philosopher Messay Kebede has steadily offered an interpretation that focuses instead on the indoctrination of Ethiopia’s intellectual elites in Western social theories that paired secularization with modernization and taught that the way of progress was to be achieved only at the cost of absolute retreat from backward native traditions. The door to the auto-genocidal Derg days was flung open, Kebede argues, during the time of the Emperor’s love affair with Western education. Once reform proved powerless, the intelligentsia—those who had bitten hard at the notion that the prosperous future was a secular future liberated from the oppression of tradition—were ripe for the acceptance of the messianic political doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. Claiming scientific authority that legitimated any means of revolutionary establishment, the Marxist Derg forced the transition to secular modernity that appeared stalled in the evolutionary process. Despite Ethiopia’s grand history of repelling military invaders, a more sinister brand of colonial influence in the form of an indigenous, culture-slay149
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ing secularization model produced a Westernized native regime as deadly, and perhaps more pernicious, to itself than any foreign occupier could have been.4 The politicalscientific doctrine of messianic Marxism-Leninism provided no deeper soil in which to sow a new Ethiopian political culture than a fanatical dedication to the revolution itself. Once nationalism was emptied of its traditionalist content, the best way to prove oneself a patriot was to display an enthusiasm for the revolution. In the context of this zealous one-upmanship, the wholesale murder of the Red Terror was countenanced by its perpetrators as the ultimate loyalty to the homeland. In Ethiopia, those who were most able to resist the tide of the tyrannical socialist state, Kebede remembers, were those who clung to aspects of traditional Ethiopian life—in this case the ancient, nationalist Orthodox Church: People of my generation offered the greatest resistance to Marxism when they remained faithful to Orthodox Christianity. Let us admit it, the story of the spread of Marxist-Leninist views among the young of the 60s and 70s is the story of Westernized Ethiopians who, having walked away from the traditional beliefs of their people under the impact of Western ideas, were craving for a substitute.5
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Messay Kebede, “Marxism-Leninism and Ethnicity as the Two Stages of Ethiopian Elitism—Part I,” Addis Tribune (19 October 2001) <www.addistribune.com/Archives/2001/10/19-10-01/Marxism.htm>. See also Kebede, “Guilt and Atonement: The Genesis of Revolutionary Spirit in Ethiopia,” Addis Tribune (6 August 2004) <www.addistribune.com/Archives/2004/08/06-08-04/Guilt.htm>.
5
Kebede, “Guilt and Atonement.”
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The experience of Ethiopia may be emblematic for the broader Marxist-impacted global South. If so, it seems secularization theory ended up, as often as not, serving as the handmaiden of ruthless politicians set adrift by the corrosive cultural influence of Western imperial powers. Those who found voices to oppose such rank abuses of authority often did so by drawing from the same traditional cultural resources the native usurpers sought to abolish. They often lost their lives in the struggle. In light of their courage, however, Kebede conceives of the possibility of a re-modernization of Ethiopia in which habits of mind and heart are shaped by a dynamic that preserves traditional Ethiopian culture as it seeks to come to grips with the realities of a modern economic and political world.6 As Kebede’s work suggests a new path for Ethiopian cultural analysis and development, though, it also offers unspoken reflections on European and American approaches to Africa: the constituent nations of the West have worked out modern cultural systems within the (now distant but yet discernable) frameworks of their own native traditional beliefs; perhaps Africa should be granted the elbow room to do the same in developing societies that respond to postmodernity on different, and quite possibly better, terms than those that have guided the West.
6
His most elaborate formulation of this vision is laid out in Survival and Modernization, Ethiopia’s Enigmatic Present: A Philosophical Discourse (Lawrence: Red Sea, 1999), where he also indicates the significant place of traditional Islam in shaping a new Ethiopian modernity.
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An Interview with Peter Berger Charles T. Mathewes
You’re known for arguing, most notably in The Sacred Canopy in the 1960s, for a theory of secularization and then for renouncing that theory in the 1990s. What are the distinctively modern characteristics of how religion is lived today? You’re right, of course, that I changed my mind over the years. It wasn’t a dramatic change—it happened in stages, and it wasn’t due to any change in theological or philosophical position. It was basically the weight of evidence, as I think a social scientist should base his theories on evidence. Much earlier than the 90s—I would say by the late 70s or early 80s—most, but not all, sociologists of religion came to agree that the original secularization thesis was untenable in its basic form, which simply said modernization and secularization are necessarily correlated developments. I followed most people in the field; I went through the same process of rethinking. There are some people who didn’t follow, and there are still some today. Steve Bruce in Britain is a heroic upholder of the old theory, which I greatly respect. He’s a very intelligent and likable fellow, and there are a few others. If I look at my early work, I think I made one basic mistake intellectually—leaving aside the question of data and empirical evidence—and that was to conflate two phenomena that are related but quite distinct: secularization and pluralization. Today you cannot plausibly maintain that modernity necessarily leads to secularization: it may—and it does in certain parts of the world among certain groups of people—but not necessarily.
Peter L. Berger is Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University. A leading scholar on secularization theory, he has written numerous books on sociological theory and the sociology of religion, most notably The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967) and the edited volume The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (1999). His most recent book is Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity (2003). Charles T. Mathewes is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He has published several books and is Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
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On the other hand, I would argue that modernity very likely, but not inevitably, leads to pluralism, to a pluralization of worldviews, values, etc., including religion, and I think one can show why that is. It’s not a mysterious process. It has to do with certain structural changes and their effects on human institutions and human consciousness. I would simply define pluralism as the coexistence in the society of different worldviews and value systems under conditions of civic peace and under conditions where people interact with each other. Pluralism and the multiplication of choices, the necessity to choose, don’t have to lead to secular choices. They can lead to religious choices—the rise of fundamentalism in various forms, for example—but they change the character of how religion is both maintained institutionally and in human consciousness. What I did not understand when I started out—my God, it’s now almost forty years ago—is that what has changed is not necessarily the what of belief but the how of belief. Someone can come out with an orthodox Catholic statement of belief—“I believe everything that the Pope would approve of ”—but how that person believes is different. What pluralism and its social and psychological dynamics bring about is that certainty becomes more difficult to attain. That’s what I mean by the how of belief. It’s more vulnerable. The what can be inherently unchanged, but the how is different, and I think the difference is that certainty becomes more difficult to attain or can only be attained through a very wrenching process, of which fundamentalism is the main expression. Might certainty itself be a modern concept? With the experience of Muslims and Christians living side by side in medieval Sicily, for example, the other people’s religion would not be a live option for them. They lived in pluralist settings, yet the question of certainty did not arise because their religious beliefs were so fundamentally in their background that it was unthinkable perhaps for these people to translate in this way. This is what I took to be the insight of your book The Heretical Imperative—the idea that modernity makes us all “foreground” our beliefs. Given that, would certainty have been a question for a twelfth-century Sicilian peasant? I’m not a historian, but my hunch is that pluralism the way I’ve defined it is not a uniquely modern phenomenon. So I’m not saying that pluralism is uniquely modern, but I think modernization has intensified this phenomenon both in depth and in scope, and in scope it’s enormous. I mean, it’s almost worldwide. I’m sure there are peasants in Indian villages who are no more pluralistic than people were two hundred years ago in those localities, but they’re becoming rare, and with mass education and mass communications of one sort or another, pluralism has become a worldwide phenomenon. It flourished in the religious sense for obvious reasons. It flourishes particularly in societies in which there is religious freedom, where everyone has the right to proclaim their messages to each other. But even in societies where the government tries to limit its effect, it happens anyway. In places like Russia, which are mildly repressive of various religious groups, it happens anyway, and it’s very difficult to stop as long as the society’s modernizing. 153
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What aspects of the modernization process accentuate, intensify, and expand the scope of pluralism? Urbanization, which inevitably means that people of very different backgrounds impact each other. Mass education. People read. Now, they may read a lot of garbage, but some people read interesting stuff, and even if they only read the newspaper, they read about other ways of life. And then modern mass communications from radio, television, films, Internet, and so on. If you want to use that favorite postmodernist term “the other,” the other is present in the consciousness of enormous numbers of people and not necessarily as an enemy. I mean, the other is an alternative possibility of life. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the idea of multiple modernities—the idea that in some important way, development is path-dependent, and so different societies will develop different kinds of modernity. Is that an idea we can translate in some sense over to the possibility of multiple secularisms or multiple secularizations? Yes, we certainly could. Take Japan, which is in a way the most interesting case because it’s the first non-Western society that has successfully modernized. Japan leads to a lot of misinterpretations of sociology, of religion data, because some people like Ron Inglehart see it as a secular society. I don’t think it’s secular at all, but it’s a very different form of religiosity. It doesn’t have the kind of dogma or church that we’re accustomed to in the West. You could say Japan is an alternate modernity in many ways, not just in religion but also the religious shape of Japan is different from that in, say, Europe or North America. What do you take to be the character of the religiosity of a society like Japan vis-à-vis a society like the United States or France or England? If Inglehart isn’t picking this up, what precisely is it that he’s not seeing? It’s very syncretistic. People see no problem going to a Shinto shrine on certain seasons of the year, being married in a Christian-like ceremony, and being buried by a Buddhist monk. This eclecticism is not just apparent in Japan—it’s in all of East Asia; China is similar in that respect. It’s very different from Western notions, which probably come from monotheism. You either believe or you don’t believe. There’s a Japanese philosopher by the name of Nakamura who wrote a book. I’ve forgotten everything about it except one sentence in it in which he says that the West has been responsible for two basic mistakes. One is monotheism—there’s only one God—and the other is Aristotle’s principle of contradiction—something is either A or non-A. Every intelligent Asian, he said, knows that there are many gods and things can be both A and B. Well, those are deep-seated cultural habits of mind, and they make both religion and secularity where it exists take on a very different form.
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How would you characterize the differences between the U.S. and the E.U. in terms of the question of secularity and secularism? In particular, what do you think about Grace Davie’s idea of “believing without belonging”? Oh, it’s a very good concept. We just finished a project at our Institute on what we call Eurosecularity, and Grace Davie and I are writing the book together to summarize what we think came out of the project. The popular perception that America is a much more religious society than Europe is correct as far as it goes. As you look more closely, America’s less religious than it seems. Europe is less secular than it seems. But the broad generalization holds, and the very important question is: how did this come about? The question is particularly interesting in terms of the old secularization theory because the United States clearly is not a heavily secularized society except in certain strata. Europe is. Well, it’s difficult to argue that the United States is less modern than, I don’t know, Belgium, so something is wrong here. You can say it’s the big exception, but why is it an exception, how do you explain it? Grace Davie is quite right: the exception is Europe, not North America, and that’s how one should begin to think about this. One can go into much greater detail. I would say America is less religious than it seems because it has a cultural elite which is heavily secularized, which, if you will, is Europeanized. The cultural elite is the minority of the population, but it has great influence through the media, the educational system, and even the law to some extent. Europe is less secular than it seems because of the kind of thing that Davie has been writing about, believing without belonging. Also belonging without believing is equally important. Again, to use one of her terms, a lot goes on under the radar. When you say Europe, one has to say Central and Western Europe. When you get into the Orthodox world, it’s a different picture. Maybe with the exception of Greece, I’m not sure. In Central and Western Europe, no question, the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, are in bad shape by any indicator of either behavior or expressed belief, and also institutionally in terms of recruitment of the clergy, the financial situation, and public influence, certainly very much compared to the United States, but a lot takes place outside the churches and that has to be taken into account. Are you referring to a turn to more diaphanous kinds of spirituality? Well, that’s certainly part of the phenomenon of religion, of what is clearly religious but outside the doors of the church, but it’s not only that. When people say—and you get this in Europe as much as in the U.S.— “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual,” what do they mean? I think they mean two quite different things. One is New Age-ist type stuff: “I want to be in harmony with the cosmos. I want to discover my inner child.” But sometimes it’s much simpler; it means, “yes, I’m interested in the questions of religion, but I don’t feel at home in any church, in any organized religion,” and that doesn’t have to have a New Age flavor.
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You get the same thing in America. Robert Wuthnow used the term “patchwork religion.” Danièle Hervieu-Léger used the term “bricolage”—tinkerings like a Lego game. You put together your own version of whatever, so that’s similar on two sides of the Atlantic, and one shouldn’t overlook that. The typical expressions of American religion are not rooted in millenia of deep cultural background. Might American religion be characterized as broader in some sense but yet shallower than religion in Europe? This relates to Hervieu-Léger’s argument about French culture being Catholic even after the populace had given up going to church. If you were an atheist in a Catholic culture, you were still a Catholic atheist—but in America maybe we’ve always been Protestants or Catholics or whatever in a fundamentally profane culture. American history virtually from the beginning, even in colonial times, was characterized by pluralism, and there were some attempts to set up state churches in Virginia and in Massachusetts, but they failed very quickly. These failures were later legitimated by the principle of religious freedom, and even before independence. Think of the Virginia Bill of Rights that Jefferson pushed through the colonial legislature. Pluralism became an -ism in a sense, not only an empirical fact, but something people were proud of, and I don’t think this necessarily means anything more superficial or shallow. I don’t see that an American Presbyterian going to church a hundred years ago was more shallow than somebody in a Scottish village. What it does mean is religion was voluntary from the beginning. The churches, even if they didn’t like this—certainly the Catholics didn’t like it—were forced to become voluntary associations, which changed the way they related to the laity and to each other. And that’s been characteristically American, so I think America in many ways is the vanguard society of religious pluralism, but it happens under very different conditions. Here it has become enshrined as almost a foundational principle of the state. Have you come to any preliminary conclusions about the likely changes in religious life in these two societies in the coming decades? Most broadly speaking, I don’t think that America is going to become much more secular or Europe much more religious. I think the basic structures are here. In America, I think this is very unlikely to change. There are some things that are happening which are interesting, and I think the increasing middle-class and higher education status of the evangelical community is going to make a difference. The interesting question is: will they change and become more like mainline Protestants or will they retain their distinctiveness and influence the culture? That’s something that’s happening in an interesting way. I wouldn’t dare to predict what this will look like forty years from now.
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In Europe, there is the really dramatic challenge of Islam and the effect this will have. Again, I wouldn’t dare to predict, but European societies are forced to rethink their, if you will, ideological basis in a way which didn’t happen earlier—and certainly in terms of laïcité. Muslims are not only radical Muslims; ordinary Muslims don’t play by the rules of that game. They don’t want to play by the rules of that game. So change is occurring, but at the moment I don’t see the likelihood of anything terribly dramatic. What do you think of the predictions of demographic changes, for example, the reported decline in birth rates in Europe? Do you think that the possibility of the traditional ethnicities of these various nations staying stable or even declining in population numbers vis-à-vis immigrants, etc., will cause some large-scale pressures? I’m sure it will. The Muslim population within the E.U. will continue to grow, and that will have certain consequences. How dramatic the consequences will be I don’t know. A very important issue is not only what European governments are going to do and how European publics are going to look at this—and this could become very ugly; it could become a nativist, intolerant kind of thing. Equally important is what will happen within the Muslim communities, and there is a struggle going on. I was in Holland a few months ago, and I visited the first Islamic university in the Netherlands. It’s very interesting what’s happening there. They want to be Dutch Muslims. They don’t want to take money from the Middle East. They don’t want Wahhabi faculty. There are other voices as well—fanatical jihad voices. The struggle for the soul of European Islam is going to be a very important issue, not just for Europeans. It’ll affect us. It’ll affect the Middle East. It’ll affect everybody else, but that’s as far as I would go in terms of prognosis. Given all of this about secularization, have we learned something that is useful about the idea of religion or the concept of religion? It’s certainly useful to understand that religion is not about to disappear. The belief is still quite prevalent among intellectuals—secular intellectuals—that religion is a kind of backwoods phenomenon that with rising education will increasingly disappear. That’s not happening. It’s not going to happen. What do you think about Hervieu-Léger’s argument, that in some ways the notion of religion itself is deeply connected to notions of memory and similar things, so that the frequent focus on religious interiority, such as we find in William James, might be quite mistaken? It seems that the attention that sociologists such as Max Weber have given to this should make us rethink received understandings of religion, that religion is in some ways at least as much socially fundamental as it is individual.
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Yes, but that’s not just Weber. Certainly the French sociologist Emile Durkheim had the same notions. You get this in American sociology. You get it in anthropology. Since I’ve spent much of my intellectual career looking at third-world development, Weber is important in terms of his notions of the Protestant ethic. We now can say that he was wrong about certain things—he may have been wrong in exaggerating the importance of Protestantism; he was certainly wrong about Confucianism. He died in 1921; how could he foresee the East Asian economic miracle of the post-World War II period? But the questions he asked were the right ones, and if you break down the Protestant ethic into its behavioral categories, systematic works, saving, delayed gratification, all of these things, they’re as relevant today in much of the world, in developing societies, as they were in Europe and North America in the seventeenth century. So that’s a lasting legacy of Weber which I think is highly relevant, and much of the work we’ve been doing out of this Institute has to do with this. Our Institute is twenty years old now, but when we started, one of our first projects was on Pentecostalism in Latin America, directed by David Martin. It was pioneering. Now, all kinds of other people have gotten in. My mental title for that project was “Max Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala.” You look at these people, and they speak Spanish or even Mayan, but they act like the Puritans that Weber was describing. Pentecostalism now is a worldwide phenomenon, anywhere between a quarter and a half billion people. I want to ask about your predictions, not so much about the future of real phenomena like religions, as about the future of the study of such phenomena. What are the questions we need to be asking now that we are not asking? One very important topic is one that you raised a little while back of multiple modernities and what are the viable syntheses—viable economically, politically, morally, if you will—between modernity and various traditional cultures. That’s a question of life-anddeath importance in terms of the Muslim world, but it’s also very important in terms of China, in terms of India, in terms of Russia. Those are tremendously important questions which are susceptible to social science inquiry. They’re not dark mysteries. It’s not a question of the Russian soul. It’s a question about the Russians’ belief, about how they act, about what their political institutions are, etc., so that seems to me an extremely important thing to look at. The other has to do with Weber’s heritage. The questions about which religious traditions and institutions are conducive to economic growth and democracy are very important, so I would argue on the basis of a good deal of data that Pentecostalism is a modernizing force. It is conducive to economic development and maybe, although it’s less clear, conducive to democratic development.
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With Islam, you have a much more ambiguous situation. Very crucial to this is the role of women. If half the population is basically shut out of economic and public life, it’s not very good for economic development. I’m not saying there are no possibilities of a Protestant “ethic.” There are some cases of this, but if you look at the Muslim world as a whole, it’s a much more ambiguous picture, so that’s another very important area of research. Some scholars argue that the kind of radical Islamism that has appeared in Europe and the Middle East is a distinctly modern, distinctly Protestant kind of Islam because it has become detached in crucial ways from the local cultural contexts within which Islam always found itself. One of the strengths of Islam historically has been what we might call its portability across cultures, its ease of translation, which is in part because of the minimal character of its demands to change one’s life. It allowed some particular cultural context to flesh out its precepts. Some scholars, most notably Olivier Roy, suggest that contemporary radical Islamists simply take the “de-territorialized” kernel of the faith and jettison the cultural husk, presenting the kernel as the true tradition—without even realizing what they’re missing. Radical Islam is a modern phenomenon in the sense that every fundamentalist religion is a modern phenomenon, even if you take the original meaning of “fundamentalism” in American Protestant history. It was a reaction against modernity, but it couldn’t have happened before modernity. “Fundamentalism” used for Islam or Hinduism or Judaism is a little iffy, because it has a very distinctive American Protestant meaning, but if you’re going to use the term—and we’re probably stuck with it—I would define it rather narrowly as an attempt to restore the taken-for-grantedness of the position that has been challenged, or as we discussed earlier, an attempt to restore certainty. We talked earlier about the changes in religion in terms of not the what, but the how. That means that religious belief and religious life become much more vulnerable. Every fundamentalism responds to that vulnerability and says, “Look, join us and you will no longer be uncertain as to who you are, how you should live, what the world is.” That is very different from traditional religion, traditional Islam or any other. A person who lives in a taken-for-granted traditional world can afford to be quite tolerant. The one who doesn’t share that world is interesting, maybe even amusing, like somebody who believes the earth is flat. It doesn’t threaten us. But when you are dealing with an attempt to restore a certainty that has been challenged, chances are you can’t afford to be very tolerant, and the one who is outside your community of belief is a threat. You have to convert him or you have to segregate yourself from him, or in the extreme case, liquidate him. In that sense, I would say every fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. And many movements that can be described as fundamentalist have used modern techniques of communication very effectively.
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Al Qaeda escaped Afghanistan and is now living on the web. This is what I’ve heard terrorist experts say. The Ayatollah Khomeini came to power through cassettes. Do you have any intimations about what scholars who study these matters are more or less completely missing today? Are there large questions that twenty or fifty years from now we’ll look back on and say, “Wow, we really should have been thinking about that”? I wrote an article some years ago about four highly significant developments of the postWorld War II period which were not anticipated by social scientists and which even in retrospect they have great difficulty in explaining: the collapse of socialism, the cultural revolution of the late 60s and early 70s in the West, the meteoric rise of East Asia, and the explosion of religious movements all over the world. Those are four highly significant events of the twentieth century. Hardly anyone predicted them, and even in retrospect people have difficulty explaining them. These are monumental failures, and where do the failures come from? Well, in terms of sociology, I would say they come from an abandonment of asking the big questions which gave birth to sociology as a discipline. What is the modern world? What are its basic forces? That failure has two rules. The older one is methodological. I’ve called it “fetishism of method,” where you have the ambition to be like physicists. The basic principle was, and still is, “that which cannot be quantified cannot be studied,” and that has meant a tremendous trivialization. That goes back to the 50s in American sociology, and European sociology basically followed the American lead. Then in the 60s and 70s, you had an ideological, neo-Marxist ideological wave overcoming the field, and science became propaganda. So between trivialization and ideology, I would say sociology has become a pretty depressing field with individuals and some centers doing good work. I think something very similar happened in political science and anthropology—not in economics, though the economists are so captive to their particular vocabulary and conceptual machinery, they can’t deal with anything that doesn’t fit into that. And that’s pretty awful, too, in a different way. You have, at least, two large projects: your sociological inquiries, and, broadly construed, a theological form of inquiry. How do you understand the relationship between these two? Does one of them emerge from the other? Do you think of them as written for two fundamentally different audiences, or do you conceive of them as two parts of a larger and at least roughly coherent whole? I’ve never had any problem with this. As far as sociology or social science is concerned, I’m an orthodox Weberian. I believe in value-free science. I think what I’ve written may be wrong, it may be biased here and there, but as I understand my own work, it is value-free. For example, the whole issue of secularization: I think I would have gone 160
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through the same conceptual journey if I had been an atheist or a Buddhist or whatever. Now, I don’t see any problem in that. This is not the only hat I wear, since I have very intense religious interests and define myself as a Christian, though in a rather heretical way—I’ve written on that, too. Well, why not? I mean, a cousin of mine in Austria is an accomplished classical musician, particularly with Mozart. He also plays jazz. Are those two incompatible? Apparently not. I don’t think there are any great biographical revelations to divulge here. I was interested in religion before I even knew that sociology existed. As a young man I wanted to be a Lutheran minister and then decided this wasn’t for me. Sociology I stumbled into more or less by accident and then got intrigued with these questions intellectually. So here are two quite different interests, I pursued both of them, and it comes out in my publications. After all, some people are lechers and stamp collectors, but they manage to do these things at different times. One hopes. Yes. You could have an orgy with stamp collectors, but that’s unlikely. Indeed. Let me ask you about what sorts of large-scale worries you have—as a scholar, as a concerned citizen, as a private individual—about the character of society or the direction in which society may be going? And what hopes accompany those worries? I don’t know how to answer that—my worries are not terribly unusual. One is worried about nuclear terrorism, about environmental degradation, about new pandemics of one sort or another. Those are very unoriginal worries. In terms of hopes: so far Western democracies have managed to solve their problems with reasonable efficiency, and I have considerable confidence in the ingenuity and innovativeness particularly of American society to deal with its problems. I don’t find myself terribly pessimistic about the future of this society, but obviously there are catastrophic scenarios that are possible, and some are uncomfortably possible. Just think—a single nuclear act of terrorism in America or Europe, and we’d find ourselves in a different world the next day, much more so than after 9/11, and there are other such possibilities. What about long-term things? What could happen in the course of this next century? I don’t know. If you took a modern social scientist with all his paraphernalia and dropped him in the center of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, would he have predicted the Reformation? I doubt it, so—what’s the phrase that Rumsfeld loves—stuff happens.
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Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan, 2004.
“I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a private letter in 1822, “who will not die an Unitarian.” Only four years before his death, the author of Virginia’s landmark Statute for Religious Freedoms clearly envisioned the nation’s path as one toward a Christianity based on reason rather than pure faith and denominational dogmatism.1 Jefferson’s prediction was mistaken. Today most Americans are not Unitarians. In her important and timely new book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, journalist Susan Jacoby grapples with the history of secular thought in the United States and the fate of Jefferson’s much heralded reason-based beliefs. By looking to the past, Jacoby attempts to illuminate contemporary debates about the proper role for religion in the public square. Her core argument is that secular thought formed the root origins of American democracy. Yet, she contends, this fact has been obscured. Freethinking secularists who attained significant influence on the nation and its direction often
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have been vilified or otherwise veiled. In Freethinkers she therefore argues that it is “past time to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nation’s historical memory” (11). Freethinkers boldly enters into today’s turbulent debates over whether the American government has authentically Christian or secular origins. Often ideologically driven, answers to this driving question have been a long-standing feature of how Americans construct narratives about the nation and its path in the world. Since the providential account of George Bancroft in the nineteenth century, many histories of the United States have sought to establish that the nation had Christian roots that ought to endure. Contemporary works that attempt this project or seek to deny it are plentiful. Mark Noll and George Marsden assert that “Christian nation” arguments are overstated; efforts to find “belief ” in founding texts represent a cherry picking of phrases that grossly distorts the nominally Christian rhetoric emerging from the deist and Enlightenment rationalist beliefs of many of the founding generation. Comparative religion scholar Diana Eck, in contrast, emphasizes culture. She asserts that the nation on the whole has
Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984) 1458–9; Edwin S. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 145–6. On Thomas Jefferson and civil religion, see also Thomas E. Buckley, S. J., “The Religious Rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson,” The Founders on God and Government, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark D. Hall, and Jeffrey H. Morrison (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) 53–82. See also the forthcoming work of Johann Neem on Jefferson’s conception of religion and his philosophy of history.
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always been Christian, yet what makes it unique today is not the persistent power of Christianity but, rather, the remarkable level of religious pluralism and tolerance across American society. Historian Nathan Hatch adds early politics to this pluralist position by arguing that there was a “democratization” of American Christianity from the earliest days of the Republic, which shaped the rise of the U.S. as a democratic Christian nation.2 Given the charged atmosphere in which these debates take place, Jacoby was wise to select “freethinkers” for her title. The term is powerful, if vague. It conjures up that most vaunted of American principles: “freedom”—freedom to think, to speak, to assemble, and to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Secularists—a term which she uses interchangeably with freethinkers—pursue liberty-based goals, yet seem less noble somehow, as people of faith easily negate secularists and their views by portraying them as atheists and agnostics, as unprincipled, or simply as godless heathens. “Freethinking” itself is a term derived from a phrase that first appeared in the late 1600s and flourished into a philosophical movement in the nineteenth century. The philosophy of “freethought” pivoted on the belief that judgments about religion should be based on reason and evidence from the natural world rather than on tradition, authority, or
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received or revealed truths. According to Jacoby, freethinkers ran the gamut from the anti-religious to the devout. What they shared, she says, regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earthly existence—a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world. (4–5)
See George Bancroft, History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent (Boston: Little, Brown, 1834); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
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The book opens with a telling anecdote about the present state of religious politics. President Bush chose Washington’s Episcopalian National Cathedral to issue an ecumenical address four days after the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Basing his words on the famous passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, President Bush consoled the nation by invoking religiously informed language while standing beside representatives of several major religions. This signaled a profound break from the tradition of separation of church and state, Jacoby informs her readers. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin Roosevelt would not and did not do such things (even after a direct attack on the United States). With this as a springboard, Freethinkers moves from the revolutionary era through the present to chronicle the development of American secularism and explain how we “got here.” Recovering this story is no mean feat. “The religiously correct version of American history,” Jacoby proclaims, “has never given proper credit to the central importance of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights—or to the anticlerical abolitionists who advanced that concept before the public—in building the case against slavery” (70). Jacoby takes pains to demonstrate that a robust Enlightenment rationalism undergirded the objectives of many framers and signers of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Having thrown off the chains of British rule, “Americans lived no longer in an age of faith,” Jacoby contends, “but in an age of faiths and an age of reason” (34). As their model, the founders consciously 164
selected Virginia. It “is impossible to overstate the importance” of Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom because “much to the dismay of religious conservatives, it would become the template for the secularist provisions of the federal Constitution” (19). Many state constitutions commingled religion and government in the pre-Constitution period. Indeed, quite a few, such as Massachusetts, continued to uphold formal, established religions and oaths for public officials well after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. However, these states were in the minority. Many members of the founding generation were concerned that “established” religions—even at the state level—would act to the detriment of the republic as a whole. Thus, “[w]ith its refusal to invoke any form of divine sanction, even the vaguely deistic ‘Providence,’” Jacoby argues convincingly, “the Constitution went even further than Virginia’s religious freedom act in separating religion from government” (29). To bind citizens within the nation, secular values seemed more likely to connect citizens than religious beliefs. Developments such as crafting a Constitution without reference to God and enacting statutes of religious toleration did not represent unalloyed good done by those of the freethinking persuasion. “[S]ecularists are not value-free,” Jacoby insists; “their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments” (10). Jacoby recovers and sympathizes with the relatively forgotten lives and stories of the heroes of secular thought. Among those
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in the pantheon are: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, suffragist and author of the “Woman’s Bible,” who said that “every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman”; Lucretia Mott, the ardent feminist whose personal motto was “truth for authority, not authority for truth”; William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist, for whom “truth is older than any parchment”; and Robert Green Ingersoll, the so-called “Great Agnostic,” who notably hoped that “we have retired the gods from politics. We have found that man is the only source of political power, and that the governed should govern.” Jacoby notes the subtle influence of freethought in the public expressions and actions of a diverse set of American luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John F. Kennedy. Freethought as a philosophy never fully sustained an organized movement in America, although Jacoby asserts that it “flowered into a genuine social and philosophical movement…fraught with ambivalence” (4). Freethinking was a way of looking at the world and making judgments about religion that is probably best understood as a cohesive cluster of ideas that can be only loosely defined as an intellectual movement. If there was a prime mover in the constellation of American freethinking stars, Jacoby concludes that it was Thomas Paine. Paine, the renowned revolutionary, authored what became the American Revolution’s most iconic patriotic tract, Common Sense, which sold an astonishing 500,000 copies in the mid-1770s. Paine also penned the less well-known
and much maligned pamphlet The Age of Reason, published in 1794. This was no quixotic act, according to Jacoby. Paine attacked not only the ecclesiastical and monarchic hierarchies in The Age of Reason, but also religious beliefs of many kinds. He went on to propound a misguided expectation that “a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion” (35). In perhaps the best chapter of the book, “The Great Agnostic and the Golden Age of Freethought,” Jacoby shows the importance of networks of newspapers, such as the Truth Seeker, founded in 1875, that rapidly became the nation’s best-known freethought organ. The influence of such papers was amplified by the audiences reached by an array of speakers, like Ingersoll, former abolitionists, suffragists, radicals, university professors, and labor activists—all of which helped to make freethought a viable belief system from 1875 through 1914. In this era “freedom of religion meant just that—the freedom to believe in and practice one’s creed. It did not mean that particular religious beliefs were exempt from public criticism or even from public ridicule” (172). Not many were moved to reject religion outright, but a good number seem to have been persuaded to make a case for a continued and strengthened secularist approach to public affairs. An outstanding insight Jacoby develops from this period is to show the connections developing between atheists, socialists, and Darwinists around the turn of the twentieth century. What the five-time socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs, had in common (apart from 165
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agnosticism) with Ingersoll and Darrow was a “deep commitment to the liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights” (180). Yet in the years after World War I these connections were not enough. Freethought as any sort of coherent movement began to lose momentum. After the “golden age,” freethinkers worked toward achieving the secularization of American society through the instruments of the “procedural republic”: namely, juridical review and resolution, rather than direct legislation or lecture circuits. Jacoby deploys a host of post-Scopes legal battles over the establishment clause as her primary evidence of secular thought at work in the period leading up to the present, but she lacks the public figures and largescale historical events to fully support her argument. The one major exception was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who in the late 1950s and 1960s championed a highprofile cultural battle to remove prayer from public schools. This narrow focus on freethinkers like Paine and lesser knowns such as Ingersoll is advantageous. It makes this narrative engaging and adds cohesion. But this methodology does not permit a wider view of the historical context in which Jacoby’s central individuals acted. Some of the “prominent” freethinkers were more marginalized than this account of their lives and actions would suggest. Freethinkers could stand more of what it calls for: a critical examination of what it means to be “secular” and to have an “influence” on society. To be prominent is not necessarily to be influential. Jacoby seems to suggest that to be secular is to take a liberal political-philosophical 166
position. Yet particularly in the twentieth century, a number of prominent conservatives, such as political philosopher Leo Strauss, and those of other political stripes, such as the irascible journalist H. L. Mencken, have been both passionately conservative in their politics and also ardent non-believers. Jacoby also often casts devout believers as thoroughly conservative in their politics in the modern sense, yet in the past Social Gospel advocates such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch clearly do not conform to such a generalization. The civil rights movement is yet another example of the importance of religious values animating social change. So, what values and strategies should secularists advocate today? Jacoby argues that the intellectual offspring of the freethinkers should learn from their forebears. If they want to change minds, contemporary secularists must move beyond the defense of a godless Constitution separating church and state. Beliefs cannot promote themselves: “Values are handed down more easily and thoroughly by permanent institutions than by marginalized radicals who, even if they change minds in their own generation—as the abolitionists did—are often subject to remarginalization in the next” (103). To sway hearts and minds, “secular humanists must reclaim passion and emotion from the religiously correct” (363). Overly rational arguments stand in sharp contrast to the successful faith-based emotional appeals of the current Bush administration, which “could hardly do more to demonstrate its commitment to pulverizing a constitutional wall that has served both religion and government well for more than two hundred years” (353).
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Jacoby offers not only a historical challenge to those who believe God is and has always been part of American governance, but also a warning to secularists. She concludes that it is time to confront the unexamined assumption that religion per se is, and always must be, a benign influence on society…. For secularists to mount an effective challenge to the basic premises of religious correctness, they must first stop pussyfooting around the issue of the harm that religion is capable of doing. (358) We may not all be Unitarians, as Jefferson supposed. And there was no systemic religious revolution to go with government transformation, as Paine believed. But rationalist skepticism certainly is embedded in the fundamental mechanisms of American democracy and society. One thing is clear: a better sense of the importance of secularism in the past is essential if we are to enlighten our current public dialogue in the present. To this end, Freethinkers is a good place to start.
Christopher McKnight Nichols is a Ph.D. candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and a doctoral fellow at the Center on Religion and Democracy. He is working on a dissertation project on isolationism and internationalism during the Progressive Era.
Martin, David. On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. London: Ashgate, 2005.
David Martin has been one of the leading scholars of secularization theory since the 1960s. In his magnum opus, A General Theory of Secularization (1978), Martin laid out a careful historical sociology of secularization that maintained the limited and highly particularized nature of this cultural process. Even then he doubted that secularization would be inevitable or that secularism would become universal. For him, one of the key factors for understanding how religion fares in the modern world was “social differentiation,” or the increasing autonomy of social spheres. Social differentiation refers to the tendency in modern society for social spheres to be less and less integrated. For example, the separation of church and state is a fundamental manifestation of social differentiation in the modern world. This dynamic has played out differently in different societies, which is why one finds so much variation not only in the West, but also beyond to the rest of the world. To return to the example, the establishment of the Church of England in that country has no comparison in the United States; in Chile, a different balance altogether has been struck. In his new work, On Secularization, Martin updates this theory through a compilation of articles and lectures that outline the directions in which he has moved since his general theory. Martin once again voices his skepticism towards secularization as grand narrative and 167
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implicitly reiterates his argument that just as there are multiple modernities, there are also multiple secularizations. It is not that secularization theory is untrue, as he first argued in 1965; it simply manifests itself differently in different contexts. The dynamics of religion and modernity play out differently in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In Latin America and Turkey, for example, secularism does not translate from the elites to the masses. In the United States, secularity is anything but uniform, with elites and masses divided on the question of religion. Even in Europe—the one place where the traditional notion of secularization has seemed to be at work—there is great variation: secularity in Berlin and secularism in Paris look and feel different, because they are in fact different realities. Likewise, the mass migration of Muslims to Europe is changing the reli-
gio-cultural landscape of Europe in fundamental ways. Even from casual observation, it is evident that religion has far from disappeared, and the fate of specific faith traditions remains far from clear. Of particular interest for Martin are Islam and Christianity and how one accounts for the differences between these faiths in their encounter with the modern world. Here, as in the rest of this book, Martin is more suggestive than systematic. For example, Martin brings attention to the ways in which different religions mobilize believers. Islam enters the modern world collectively, “through the mobilization of whole populations”; Pentecostal Christianity, by contrast, enters it factionally and individually, “through the mobilization of subcultural and individual self-consciousness” (144). The latter, as Martin first demonstrated in Tongues of Fire (1990), helps to explain why Pentecostalism actually welcomes in and encourages the individualism and social differentiation of modernity. To take another example, faiths vary by their implicit approach to pluralism—ranging from “voluntaristic” to “communal.” Communal pluralism is characterized by the interaction of homogenous communities with each other. The classic example of this is the acceptance of “religions of the book” by certain Islamic empires. Voluntaristic pluralism is most clearly understood as the “supermarket of beliefs,” with individuals respected for their capacity to choose. Like others, including Adam Seligman (Modernity’s Wager) and Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self ), Martin argues that
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voluntaristic pluralism is historically a product of Western Christianity. The starkest differences between religions are seen in their various relationships to power. In Martin’s conceptualization, this relationship is straightforward in Islam but paradoxical in Christianity. For Christians, a tension exists between the City of God and the City of Man. In other words, the “already” and the “not yet” of the kingdom of God have a profound impact on Christian, and derivatively Western, social and political thought, because social orders are derived from sacred orders. This paradox, which in Martin’s theological understanding should exist between Christians and power, is fundamentally different than the triumphalism of Islam. To the extent that such a paradox is manifested in the West, there “surely is a clash of civilizations” (198). And what are we to make of these religions in our increasingly globalized condition? While Martin does not answer this question conclusively, he does suggest the ways in which the twenty-first-century market culture will impact Christianity and Islam. Martin maintains that while religions are still sending out missionaries, the most efficient means of evangelism is simply for globetrotters to carry their message with them. This way of reproducing faith lines up very well with Christian individualistic mobilization. In fact, Christianity’s main challenge in the modern world, according to Martin, is internal: “it is dangerously open-ended to a degree which threatens its own viability and ability to reproduce” (169). While Islam does not have this latter problem, the individualism of market
culture is potentially corrosive to Islam as Islam reproduces itself collectively; it remains to be seen what such communal mobilization will look like in our globalizing context. A good book is in part measured by the degree to which it provokes questions. Martin’s new book brings into relief some of the critical sociological questions about religion in our day. What sources of social cohesion are Europeans left with as religious sources continue to be weakened? What will the relationship of Islam to modernity become in different parts of the world? In what ways has secularization actually revitalized religious practice, opening up space for religious faith to be newly proclaimed? While Martin does not provide a systematic theory to address all of these questions, he does provide critical concepts and insights for scholars of religion to grapple with such questions in the future.
Emily Raudenbush is Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
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Secularization: A Bibliographic Essay Kevin M. Schultz
Today, most people think that something has happened regarding the importance of religiosity in everyday life since the nineteenth century, but nobody is quite sure how to generalize it, or even if it can be generalized. This has been especially troubling for social scientists, who make a living configuring large-scale theories of society that propose to have predictive capabilities. Is it simply—as the “classic theorists” of secularization said a century ago—that when a society becomes modern it becomes secular too? Does modernity necessarily imply secularity? There is certainly something appealing to the formulation, and it became a chief preoccupation of social scientists and theologians of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, many of whom quickly became busy celebrating the death of God, the rise of the secular city, and the general triumph of secularization theory. Europe and America seemed to be throwing off the shackles of that old-time religion, becoming increasingly secular as they became more and more “modern.” The secular age had arrived. Things did not turn out as these advocates had envisioned they would. Continued religiosity became a nagging problem. Countries like the United States were witnessing something of a return to religion during the last quarter of the twentieth century. This glaring problem led to a flood of criticism in the 1980s and 1990s, suggesting that the theory had been wrong and that it was the simple-minded creation of secular hopefuls wishing for a godless future. The tone of many of these critics was just as self-righteous and triumphant as the theory’s proponents had been two decades prior. Secularization theory seemed to be in tatters. But still, wasn’t there something to it?
Kevin M. Schultz is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia’s Center on Religion and Democracy. His current book project is entitled Making Pluralism: Catholics, Jews, and the Decline of the Melting Pot in Postwar America.
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Reconfiguring what is left of secularization theory has been one of the major projects of historical sociologists during the past decade or so. Their new theories are filled with possibility, but they are also complex—so complex, in fact, that one cannot help but wonder if the social scientists are trying a bit too hard. And one senses a bit of anxiety that if the whole theory turns out to have been bunk, then the life and times of secularization theory will be turned over to historians, who might just see it as yet another example of the glaring flaw of the social sciences (namely, its disregard for history). Furthermore, secularization theory emerged at roughly the same time as the field of sociology, which was, at root, preoccupied with the meaning of modernization and crafting the theory of modernization. Along with bureaucratization, rationalization, and urbanization, secularization constituted a basic part of what it meant to be modern. Is it too far fetched to think that sociology, modernity, and secularization all need each other to survive? If secularization is tossed aside as an unreliable component of what it means to be modern, what might fall away next? And if rationalization, bureaucratization, and urbanization prove unreliable predictors too, is there anything left of classical sociology? Do all large sociological theories need to be left behind? The answers to these questions hinge, of course, on what secularization means.
Classical Theories of Secularization At its most basic, the classical theory of secularization contends that as a society becomes increasingly modern (usually as knowledge expands through the processes of scientific rationality), religion becomes less and less important to that society. Those following Weber claim that rationalization and the scientific perspective made belief in the supernatural impossible, with religion falling victim to the power of science. Others, following Durkheim, have stressed the decline of control by religious institutions over the important institutions of society. Either way, there is an evolutionary cast to the idea: as people “advance” technologically and scientifically, they no longer need the magic of the past to offer explanation or meaning. The idea that Western societies have moved away from religious or divine authority dates back to the 1600s, but it was Weber who in 1910 gave us the term “secularization.” His phrase about the increasing “disenchantment of the world” has come to signify all that secularization could mean: the decline in importance of things mystical. There is great irony in the fact that the word is Weber’s, because he was no positivist and in fact has been the single most important figure in describing the worldly significance of religion in modern sociology. For an excellent anthology of many of the key texts on the early sociology of religion, see Birnbaum and Lenzer’s edited volume. n Birnbaum, Norman, and Gertrud Lenzer, eds. Sociology and Religion: A Book of
Readings. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. n Comte, August. The Positive Philosophy. New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1858. n Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. New York: Macmillan, 1915. 171
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n Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. 1928. New York: Norton, 1975. n Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848. New
York: International, 1948. n Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Ethics. 1897. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978. n Troeltsch, Ernst. Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World. 1911. Boston: Beacon, 1958. n Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1904–5. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Institutional Secularization Secularization’s first widely accepted meaning was essentially the process of separation of church and state. More specifically, it meant the confiscation of some of the Catholic Church’s property after the Reformation (then, the same transfer in many Catholic countries after the French Revolution). One can find this definition of secularization in nearly every dictionary in Europe, despite the fact that this is the most forgotten usage of the term. Along similar lines, over the course of the nineteenth century, several institutions like the state and the university were “secularized,” meaning they were no longer controlled by formal religious bodies. This kind of secularization was usually a direct result of the rise in authority of scientific reason, and hence its occurrence within academies of higher learning has been most noted (and studied). Since these definitions are dissimilar, and do not take into account today’s most common usage of the term, readers should consult the article by Sommerville for clarifying the definitional problems. n Dahrendorf, Ralf. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1959. n Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1962. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. n Marsden, George M. The Soul of the University: From Protestant Establishment to
Established Nonbelief. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. n Marsden, George M., and Bradley J. Longfield, eds. The Secularization of the Academy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. n Sommerville, C. J. “Secular Society Religious Population: Our Tacit Rules for Using the Term Secularization.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37.2 (1998): 249–53.
Secularization as Individual Disbelief From the late nineteenth century to the present, the word “secularization” has gained the most traction by signifying a decline in religious practices within modern societ172
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ies. There is considerable evidence that those who proclaimed a rise of disbelief in the modern world (that is, the classical theorists and their champions) created straw men out of the past, suggesting that previous eras were more religious than they really were. Nevertheless, there is a small collection of good books that offer historical grounding to the rise of unbelief as a “live option” in the realm of epistemology. n Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. n Carter, Stephen L. The Culture of Disbelief. New York: Basic, 1993. n Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century. n n n n
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Febvre, Lucien. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. 1942. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan, 2004. Thomas, Keith Vivian. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner, 1971. Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Second Generation Theoreticians Voltaire and Hume were perhaps the most famous philosophers to assert that religion was a mere holdover from the pre-scientific age and that as scientific knowledge expanded, religion would occupy a smaller and smaller part of our lives. From an intellectual perspective, this idea was revived forcefully at the beginning of the twentieth century by thinkers as diverse as Robert and Helen Lynd and H. L. Mencken. From a sociological perspective, however, working out secularization theory was largely a 1960s phenomenon, a celebration of the secular city with the understanding that modernity and secularization were proceeding along just fine. Some (such as Wallace) advocated this position forcefully. Others (Berger, Luckmann) were more careful in their deliberations, suggesting that some variety of secularization had arrived but that religion had not yet been dislodged from being a primary source of moral authority. Nevertheless, they all acknowledged that secularization theory seemed to be holding true. n Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion.
Garden City: Doubleday, 1967. n Cox, Harvey. Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective. New York: Macmillan, 1966. n Dobbelaere, Karel. “Some Trends in European Sociology of Religion: The Secularization Debate.” Sociological Analysis 48.2 (1987): 107–37. n Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 173
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n Wallace, A. F. C. Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House,
1966. n Wilson, Bryan R. Religion in Secular Society: A Sociological Comment. London:
Watts, 1966.
Critics of Secularization Theory Early critics of secularization theory (Shiner, Martin, Greeley) were mostly ignored. But by the 1990s, it became evident that religion just wasn’t going away; critiques of secularization theory proliferated. Perhaps most surprising was Peter Berger’s reversal, from being one of the most thoughtful advocates of secularization theory in the 1960s to flatly stating in 1999 that the “whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken” (2). Rodney Stark and Andrew Greeley were some of the more persistent critics, often using polling data in the U.S. as their ammunition. The central claim of the critique is that, if secularization is defined as the decline of religious beliefs and practices in modern societies, the theory of secularization is bunk. Not only has religion persisted (and the evidence is incontrovertible) but the theory also implies that the past was more religious than today, which, it turns out, is not so easy to prove. Of course, these critics were mainly looking at behavioral data and did not consider institutional secularization (as in the marginalization of religious institutions from a reality-defining role), cultural secularization (the transformation of mythic and symbolic markers), or social secularization (faith as a source of social solidarity and division). Ignorance of these aspects of secularization complicated these critiques and, as we will see, allowed for numerous scholars to critique the critiques in an attempt to rebuild secularization theory. n Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003. n Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in
American Society. New York: Harper, 1985. n Berger, Peter L., ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World n
n n n n n
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Politics. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999. Caplow, Theodore, Howard M. Bahr, and Bruce A. Chadwick. All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown’s Religion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Greeley, Andrew M. Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003. ---. Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion. New York: Schocken, 1972. Martin, David. “Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularization.” Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences. Ed. J. Gould. Baltimore: Penguin, 1965. 169–82. Shiner, Larry. “The Concept of Secularization in Empirical Research.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 6 (1967): 207–20. Stark, Rodney. “Secularization, R.I.P.” Sociology of Religion 60.3 (1999): 249–73.
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The Rise of Orthodoxy and the Persistence of Religion The secularization theory received another series of blows from scholars examining the rise of orthodoxy and the persistence of religion in a global context. If the world was presumably becoming more and more modern, religion was supposed to be going away. The problem was that it wasn’t. In fact, more orthodox religions were growing. Fundamentalisms and Pentecostalism proliferated throughout the world. The rise in awareness of these manifestations served as perhaps the final nail in the coffin of secularization theory, at least in its original formulation. n Bulka, Reuven P., ed. Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism. New York: KTAV, 1983. n Cox, Harvey. Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping
of Religion in the 21st Century. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995. n Freston, Paul. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001. n Gittelson, Natalie. “American Jews Rediscover Orthodoxy,” The New York Times n n n n n n n
Magazine. 30 September 1984: 41–71. Hunter, James Davison. American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983. Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Martin, David. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. ---. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby. The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World. Boston: Beacon, 1992. McGuire, Merideth. Pentecostal Catholics. Philadelphia: Temple, 1982. Weaver, Mary Jo, and R. Scott Appleby. Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Attempts to Formulate a New Theory Not everyone is ready to give up on secularization theory. And indeed, some of the most thoughtful of the critics (Martin) have pulled reversals similar to that of Berger. The tactic of the “new believers” is to salvage the idea behind the theory but to soften its predictive capacity, or to shift the definition of secularization by emphasizing different aspects of what secularization means. Some (Bibby, Finke and Stark) have suggested that because most of the critics work in the U.S., challenges to secularization theory are merely utterances of “American exceptionalism.” What really needs explaining, they contend, is why there is so much religion in the U.S., and to do so they use “supply-side theory”: religion persists because supply can easily adapt to demand.
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On the other side of the Atlantic, scholars have pointed out that many of the strongest advocates of secularization theory are European (Luckmann, Wilson, Dobbelaere, and Berger in 1967), and thus secularization is a uniquely European phenomenon, extant nowhere else in the world. Some (Norris and Inglehart) have argued that the “European exception” is attributable to the generous welfare states in Europe, which have created security and therefore limited demand for religious bodies. Meanwhile, some scholars (Chaves) have tried defining the problem away by limiting the definition of secularization to the decline of religious authority (but not individual belief ). The most persuasive attempts to recreate a theory have come from those (Martin, Casanova) who have gone a long way toward forcing us to reconsider what we mean by secularization and whether we aren’t better off thinking in terms of “multiple modernities,” where no single rule holds true for every society. Once we accept variation and change, we can begin to understand historical differences in the processes of secularization. n Bibby, Reginald Wayne. Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in
Canada. Toronto: Irwin, 1987. n Bruce, Steve. God Is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. n Chaves, Mark. “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority.” Social Forces 72.3 n
n n n n n n
n n
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(1994) 749–74. Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark. The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Martin, David. A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Scott, David, and Charles Hirshkind, eds. Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocuters. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Seligman, Adam. Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Smith, Christian, ed. The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Stark, Rodney, and William Sims Bainbridge. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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Books on the Secularization Debate At the very least, present-day theorists of secularization agree that modernity can be defined in numerous ways and that the original inception of secularization theory needs complicating. Perhaps it is time to take the tools created by the critics and the re-formulators, work out the history of what has happened concerning religion in each “modern” society, then come together in ten or twenty years and see what we come up with at that point. Perhaps there is yet to arise a new theory of secularization? For useful guides to the modern debates, see: n Bhargava, Rajeev, ed. Secularism and Its Critics. Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998. n Bruce, Steve, ed. Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the
Secularization Thesis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. n Swatos, Jr., William H., and Daniel V. A. Olson, eds. The Secularization Debate. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
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IN THIS ISSUE
Rethinking Secularization José Casanova Is Europe an Exceptional Case? Grace Davie Secularization and the Impotence of Individualized Religion Steve Bruce Challenging Secularization Theory Paul Heelas In Search of Certainties Danièle Hervieu-Léger Sellers or Buyers in Religious Markets? Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart French Secularism and the “Islamic Veil Affair” Talal Asad Secularity without Secularism David Novak American Religion and European Anti-Americanism Thomas Albert Howard Islam in the West or Western Islam? Olivier Roy Secularization, European Identity, and “The End of the West” Slavica Jakelić Islam in European Publics Nilüfer Göle Interview with Peter Berger
