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1 Introduction
1.1 An approach to postsecularity
This is a book about the hopeful possibility that emerging geographies of post-secularity are able to contribute significantly to the understanding of how common life may be shared, and how caring for the common goods of social justice, well-being, equality, solidarity, and respect for difference may be imagined and practiced. Although the religious and the secular are often defined as binary opposites, our discussion in the book explores alternative configurations of these terms. We regard religion to be conditions of being and cultural systems of belief and faith-practice that seek imperfectly to interconnect humanity with the spiritual and the transcendental. We regard the secular as a political project to deny religion a place in the affairs of state; an imperfect social structure designed to limit conflict by privileging universal human rights above any religious demands. In these terms, then, religion is nether cancelled out, nor taken over by an increasingly secularised society. Rather, over time the religious and the secular are becoming co-assembled in interesting new ways.
Over recent years, the notion of postsecularity has emerged across the humanities and social sciences both as a description of the social, cultural, and political re-emergence or new visibility of religion in the urban public sphere (Beaumont and Baker 2011), and as an analytical frame through which to re-examine the co-production of religious and secular domains in ways that depart from the secularisation thesis (see Olson et al. 2013). Drawing on formative ideas from Jurgen Habermas and Klaus Eder, the concept of postsecularity reflects both instances of a vigorous continuation of religion in a continually secularising environment, and a more general rise in public consciousness of religious discourse and social action. Despite evidence of a continuing linear movement from ‘the relatively religious to the rather secular’ (Woodhead 2012, 374), it is now clear that religious identification, belief, and practice continue to be influential, albeit in Western nations often in a more vicarious form involving believing but not belonging (Davie 2015). Contemporary religion, then, concerns myriad and increasingly pluralised sites of subjective and subaltern cultural reproduction as well as more traditional institutions. Rather than focussing on supposed moves from the religious to the secular or vice versa, we seek to shift the emphasis of these debates towards the particular sites, spaces, and practices where diverse religious, humanist, and secular voices come together dialogically and enter into a learning and experimental process in which secular and religious mentalities can be reflexively transformed.
Previously the secularisation thesis (Berger 1967) had suggested the gradual demise of religion as a relevant discourse in the public arena. Habermas (2010) notes how the differentiation of functional social systems during much of the twentieth century resulted in churches and religious communities withdrawing from much of their wider societal intervention, and increasingly confining themselves to their core duties of pastoral care. At the same time, the practice of personal faith also became more individualised, more associated with private pursuit of ritual and dogma than with agitating for wider social responsibility. However, Habermas points to significant areas of social change that have arrested and even reversed some of these privatising trends. First, given the process of Western transformation into post-colonial immigrant societies, the social integration of immigrant cultures has been at least in part bound up in the question of how to achieve tolerant and hospitable coexistence between different religious communities. Second, there is evidence that cultural and social modernisation does not depend on the necessity of depleting the public and personal relevance of religion. Indeed, as we discuss in Chapter 2, the supposed hopelessness of the current post-political age rests in no small measure on a disillusionment about the capacity of the economics, science, technology, and ethics of the neoliberalised secular age to offer any solutions to fundamental issues of inequality, injustice, and commodity fetishism. Third, and partly in the form of a response to these circumstances, Habermas notes that religion has begun to regain influence in a variety of public spheres, most notably as churches and faith-based organisations increasingly assume a public role of ‘communities of interpretation’, for example, by using their voice to campaign about key issues of social injustice and to speak truth to power in various ways. Accordingly, the previously hushed-up voice of religion is, according to Eder (2006), beginning to be heard again in the public sphere, a turnaround reflected in Berger’s (1999) recognition of the counter-secularising forces manifest in desecularisation, and in Casanova’s (2011) modifications to the secularisation thesis, acknowledging that despite multiple and diverse secularisations in the West, and multiple and diverse Western modernities, religion remains relevant and influential despite the onward march of other elements of modernist secularisation.
You may well ask, so what? Given a broad presumption amongst the largely secularised academy of social science that religion (typically illustrated by extreme fundamentalist practices) is either an irrelevant cluster of myths and rituals, or indeed a negative source of illiberal attitudes towards violence and social and cultural alterity, the only cause for concern might be that the secularisation of society has not completed the task of privatising religion and stripping it of its public voice. We want to acknowledge at this early stage that some partnerships between the religious and the secular clearly do have a ‘dark side’ that becomes apparent when strongly conservative religious and political discourses combine to construct political and ethical battlegrounds from which to oppose human rights in areas, for example, relating to sexuality, gender, and welfare (see, for example, Valentine and Waite 2011). Such instances, although appearing to fulfil the criteria of ‘postsecular’, contribute nothing of value to the inculcation of more hopeful geographies, and merely serve to reinforce a characterisation of religion as being hand-in-glove with neoliberal politics of subject-formation (see, for example, Hackworth 2012), and with a more general politics of disgust (see Inbar et al. 2009).
However, in this book we present a rather different, and (in our view) more progressive notion of postsecularity, and as a start, for clarity of argument, we need to be clear what we think postsecularity is not: not a universal epochal shift; not a wholesale regime change of entire cities or nations; not a reversal of secularisation; not a return to some kind of pre-secular; not a campaign that equates religion with illiberal moralities. All of these notions appear to us to be too hefty, blunt, and binaric (see Dwyer 2016) to be useful. Rather we envisage postsecularity as a more context-contingent bubbling up of ethical values arising from amalgams of faith-related and secular determination to relate differently to alterity and become active in support of others by going beyond the social bubble of the normal habitus. These ethical values are marked by an explicit ‘crossing-over’ of religious and secular narratives, practices, and performances that become visible in key geographical expressions of overcoming difference; in certain spaces devoted to care, welfare, justice, and protest, and in certain expressions of dynamic subjectivity characterised by greater degrees of in-commonness and heightened care for the common good. It is for these reasons we place a deliberate emphasis on the concept of postsecularity – as a condition of being – in preference to specific time-space conceptions of the ‘postsecular’, and their philosophical justifications wrapped up in ‘postsecularism’. The being of postsecularity is conditioned by a co-productive relationship between faith and reason, involving a commitment to solidarity and an openness to difference. It is about doing something together based on an acceptance of the unknowns and unknowables in particular contexts and being open to what could emerge from a mutual action based on ethical negotiation. It can reflect to varying extents both a relaxation of secular suspicion towards spirituality and related re-enchantment, and a willingness to take religious values out into the secular world without being consumed by the fear that in so doing those values will not be diluted or undermined. In these terms, and as we proceed to examine in later chapters, geographies of postsecularity are evident, and can be comprehended, in normative, empirical, and phenomenological registers, reflecting a blurring of sacred and secular spaces and subjectivities through the co-production of hopeful imaginaries, hopeful ethical sensibilities, and hopeful practices.
1.2 Contexts of postsecularity
One of the key distinctions in our approach to postsecularity is that we recognise it to be context-contingent. This not only applies to the geographical diversity of religion, and the consequent careful assertion that what we are examining here takes a particular form in affluent areas of Europe, Canada, and Australasia (although also traceable in different forms elsewhere – see Chapter 6), but also to particular periods of political and material change. One of the principal objections to the idea of the postsecular (see, for example, Kong 2010; Ley 2011; Wilford 2010) is that it simply describes what is already known to have existed over long historical periods. In one sense, this argument is apparent in our introduction so far; secularisation has patently not killed off religion, neither is religious intervention in the public spaces of wider society a new phenomenon. Prochaska (2008), for example, charts the importance of Christian motivation to philanthropy and the politics of social justice in the UK in the nineteenth century, examining the importance of religious associations and benefactors for the delivery of public services prior to the establishment of the welfare state. Many of the organisations whose roots lay in this period – for example, the Salvation Army – have actively continued their public role over subsequent years and remain part of the landscape of contemporary postsecularity. Equally, religious narratives and organisations are evident in the history of counselling and psychotherapy (Bondi 2013), education (Dwyer and Parutis 2012; Watson 2013) and political activism (Marsh 2003; Smith 1996). We would argue that revisiting these spaces through the gaze of postsecularity has the capacity to reveal a more complex picture of assimilation and mutually reflexive transformation of secular and theological ideas than presented elsewhere. However, we do also want to suggest that the bubbling up of spaces and subjectivities of postsecularity in the present day owes much to the way in which contemporary events are delivering particular phenomenologies of need and of societal change which in turn serve to motivate a desire for collaborative activity. Put simply, the subjective conditions of late-capitalism and late-secularism have fundamentally changed. Ward (2009), for example, identifies globalisation with its attendant multiculturalism and insecure patterns of working life, and postmodernity with its espousal of the ironic, the eclectic, and soft forms of hypersubjectivity, as crucial to the assemblage of new kinds of circumstances, including a reanimated embrace of spirituality.
It is important, then, to acknowledge that the context of postsecularity is changing, and that there are aspects of emergent postsecularity that underscore the significance of the contemporary empirical moment (see Williams 2015). For example, the form and intensity of religious/secular crossovers have changed significantly through the multifarious realisation of radically plural societies (Molendijk et al. 2010). Established sources of secularity and ideologies of secularism have been reconfigured as liberal democratic states enlist diverse religious groups to deliver social cohesion, representation, and ‘culturally appropriate’ services (Beckford 2012; De Vries 2006). As a result, ethical values are increasingly being constructed through amalgamations of secular, spiritual, and religious frameworks (Bender and Taves 2012). Similar shifts towards postsecularity are also evident in the discourses and practices of international development and humanitarianism (Ager and Ager 2011; Deneulin and Rakodi 2011; Khanum 2012; Mitchell 2017), and in the growth of ‘alternative’ economic spaces linked to Islamic influence in global political-economic networks (Atia 2012; Pollard and Samers 2007). Further evidence of postsecularity can be found in the pluralistic sensibilities and horizontalist organisation of recent social movements – for example, Occupy Wall Street, Taksim Gezi Park and the Arab Spring (see Cloke et al. 2016; Barbato 2012; Dabashi 2012; Mavelli 2012) – all of which have been marked by an explicit ‘crossing over’ of religious and secular narratives, symbolism, practice, and performance in public space. These trends, events, and circumstances indicate not so much a differentiation of religion from supposedly secular spheres of political, cultural, and economic life (Wilford 2010), but rather how the mutually constitutive dynamics between religious and secular are becoming increasingly visible in the public domain.
Postsecularity in these terms can be represented as an epiphenomenon of its times; an effect of, response to, and resistance against dramatic global and cultural transformations, often illustrated in terms of how poorer communities and societies reach out to religion as a response to the need for reassurance (see, for example, Davis’ 2007 account of Planet of Slums). Such illustrations, of course, often serve to reinforce the prejudicial regard for hierarchical forms of religion as an expression of existential insecurity (Norris and Inglehart 2004), but we want to argue that religion – and in particular more non-hierarchical forms of spirituality – can equally be viewed as an intrinsically important and valuable cause of affirmative human activity. For example, the propensity for postsecular collaboration has clearly flourished in the landscape of neoliberal governance, as gaps left by shrinking public service provision and the contracting out of service delivery have been filled at least in part by faith-based and other Third Sector organisations. In a recent discussion of food banking in the UK, Cloke et al. (2017) suggest that current responses to food insecurity and poverty is occurring ‘in the meantime’ – gesturing both to the meanness of neoliberal politics of austerity that disproportionately penalise the poorest members of society, and to the necessity to take immediate action whilst at the same time mobilising an ethics and politics of social justice in resistance to the causes of this poverty. It is the phenomenology of need, coupled with a latent ethical sensibility to act (often in this case founded on theological as well as ideological properties) that may well be causing a wider conscientisation of staff and volunteers in food banks, and a host of other settings of care and welfare. As the welfare state becomes denuded and hollowed out, so a small multitude of people are being prompted to act because of personal and societal experience of the unmet needs of others. Some commentators translate these context-contingent causes and effects as surrender of religious specificity and incorporation into the political ethos of state-led governmentality. Third Sector involvements in welfare are therefore typically interpreted as being co-opted by and attuned to the objectives and values of contemporary governance. Woodhead (2012, 15) gives us one such narrative drawing on recent history when the political left ruled the urban political roost:
Once the churches had thrown in their lot with the welfare state and with secular priorities, however, their distinctiveness was in danger. They became part of the social fabric and the reigning moral and cultural ethos. This was one reason why religion became increasingly invisible in the welfare era. Another was that, once the churches had surrendered control to the state, the partnership could easily be forgotten, particularly by the political left.
We acknowledge that negative public response to faith-based organisations seems to have eased over intervening years (Beaumont and Cloke 2012). However, more generally, such analyses seemingly present an interpretative frame that offers an unhelpful choice when analysing religious public action between being understood as co-option or as resistance; and in so doing obscures some of the more progressive possibilities that can arise in and through the spaces of postsecular action. As we discuss in Chapters 3 and 4, many of these spaces of postsecularity may be more fruitfully understood in terms of a theoretical ‘messy middle’ (May and Cloke 2014) in which obsession with either/or frameworks of understanding makes it is easy to pass over the ordinary but significant ethics and politics of possibility constructed and performed therein both as an effect of the context, and as a cause of context-specific agency.
If specific temporal phases of globalisation and neoliberal austerity offer one set of political landscapes in which to understand context-contingent postsecularity, then another significant form of context is pedagogic in nature. In short, the heavily secularised nature of the social science academy has often resulted in an unwillingness to recognise religion as a force for good, or as a useful partner in secular endeavours. This secular social scientific gaze has resulted in a reluctance to contemplate the possibility of postsecularity at work, which in turn presents a pedagogic stumbling block to the recognition of any potential hopefulness arising in spaces and subjectivities of postsecularity. If a hegemonic pedagogic interpretation of religion only allows us to interpret faith-based activities as self-serving acts of charity, that at best provide an outlet for liberal guilt and morality, and at worst provide cover for proselytising and entrapment of vulnerable citizens, then it follows automatically that no good can come of such activities, and any scholarship that suggests otherwise is simply uncritical. It is only as this blinkered set of assumptions has been challenged that the recognition and critical examination of geographies of postsecularity has been enabled. A brief review of geographies of religion (see, for example, Hopkins et al. 2013) illustrates the rising importance of this challenge. Until very recently, geographical study of religion has been carried out in a marginalised subfield that has struggled to establish itself as mainstream and has been neglected as a source of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary initiative (Ley and Tse 2013; Tse 2014). Religion has been the last great otherness in geography; that which has been most shunned and swerved around by the general practice of the subject, which on the whole remains resolutely secular in nature and cautious about conceiving of religion as being interconnected with progressive ethics or politics (see Cloke 2010; 2011). In Yorgason and della Dora’s (2009, 629) terms, religion has been the ‘terra incognita’ of human geography. More recently, however, interesting cross-overs between religion and other geographical issues – gender, mobility, identity, welfare provision, ethicality, and the like – have prompted a gentle repositioning of scholarship on religion and spirituality (see, for example, Bartolini et al. 2016; Hopkins et al. 2012; Holloway and Valins 2010; Kong 2010; Yorgason and della Dora 2009). As part of this steer – one can hardly think of it as a ‘turn’ – geographers have become more actively involved in multidisciplinary discussions (sparked initially by the work of Justin Beaumont 2008a; 2008b; Beaumont and Dias 2008) relating to the possibilities of faith-based involvement in wider practices of postsecularity. A series of seminal conferences and edited collections have followed (including Molendijk et al. 2010; Beaumont and Baker 2011; Beaumont and Cloke 2012; Gorski et al. 2012; Nynas et al. 2015) that have served to open up discussion of how geography might respond to and interact with the concept of postsecularity.
One crucial element of these multidisciplinary discussions has been a gradual, and perhaps sometimes grudging, acknowledgement that intellectual appreciation of faith, belief, and religion has needed to change. The starting point in wider social science was similar to that in geography; there were vested interests in the continuing adhesion to the secularisation thesis, not least so as to enable critique of religion as an integral part of the broader Enlightenment agenda. Even those who were responsible fo...
