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Religion and the public square: Temple revisited, or ‘We don’t do God around here’
Laying out his programme for the social order in 1942, William Temple stated that the method of the Church’s impact upon society should be twofold:
The Church must announce Christian principles and point out where existing social order at any time is in conflict with them. It must then pass on to Christian citizens, acting in their civic capacity, the task of re-shaping the existing order in closer conformity to the principles. For at this point technical knowledge may be required and judgements of practical expediency are always required.1
At first glance this appears eminently reasonable and sensible, and one might question whether anything significant has changed since Temple wrote these words. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that much has changed and that the assumptions that undergird Temple’s approach no longer hold good.
One of the major differences is how the relationship between the realms of faith and what we might still call the secular is understood. In the 1940s there was an agreed compartmentalization of different spheres of activity that left religion as one among many. As Temple himself wrote, ‘It is commonly assumed that Religion is one department of life, like Art or Science, and that it is playing the part of a busybody when it lays down principles for the guidance of other departments, whether Art and Science or Business and Politics.’2
Although Temple then goes on to propose ways in which the Church is to ‘interfere’ and become a ‘busybody’, he accepts this basic division of labour, reaffirming ‘a perfectly sound conviction that each main department of life is independent and autonomous as regards its own technique’.3 Hence his position that the Church can only articulate principles based upon its own beliefs but must not enter into debates about detailed policy prescriptions, which will be left to the ‘experts’ in the relevant field. The demarcation lines between religion and politics are thus clear and distinct.
So how does he suggest that the Church should interfere? In three basic ways. First, its members must fulfil their moral responsibilities and functions in a Christian spirit. Second, they must exercise their purely civil rights in the same way. Finally, they must supply themselves with a systematic statement of principles to assist them in those two tasks.4 So it is legitimate for the Church to state the broad principles on which a society and economy should be based, ‘but it must leave to the politician the devising of the precise means to those ends’.5
Maybe this division of labour did work in 1942 and appeared legitimate at the time, but one can argue that cultural changes since then have brought such an approach into question, and that now a different understanding is required if one is to keep faith with Temple’s original aim of ‘interfering’ in the public realm.
What are those changes? One can argue that the role of the Church in society has moved in two opposite directions at once. On the one hand, it has a decreased public authority as matters of faith have become more personalized and marginalized, but on the other, faith communities have been called upon in recent years to contribute more explicitly to the social capital that binds a society together and provides a resource for voluntary action. In terms of being able to make public statements and being taken seriously, life is a lot more difficult for religious people; they are presented as being irrational and eccentric, and are portrayed as such by the media. Politicians themselves are wary of ‘coming out’ and acknowledging a faith commitment. Although there are groups such as Christians in Politics and Christians in Parliament, they seem to keep a low profile and act rather as internal support groups.
Another change is the way society now views its experts. On the one hand, we still set great store by calling upon scientists, economists and political pollsters to interpret what is going on, but the public are much more likely to question and challenge these people than they were a few generations ago. Trust has declined, as the current debates surrounding climate science display. The whole process of designing policy prescriptions to tackle certain issues – even if many are agreed that action should be taken – is much more open to debate and controversy.
In the Church of England the issue of authority is constantly tested by differences among its members over a range of concerns, from homosexuality to women bishops, and its capacity or will to engage in public controversy seems to have declined as a result. The consequences of the global financial crisis, however, have encouraged a renewed interest in public life, as witness for instance a book edited by Rowan Williams and Larry Elliott, Crisis and Recovery: Ethics, Economics and Justice,6 and also the William Temple Foundation Religious Futures Network established in 2009. Nevertheless, given the cultural changes of the past 70 years, we are now struggling to define and describe the appropriate nature of the relationship between religion and public life.
Overall, one can say that those strict boundaries between faith and the external world have become blurred and confused, and that attempts to ‘police’ matters of faith and keep them behind the closed doors of church and chapel are becoming increasingly strained. One aspect of this is the resurgence of religion globally and the need to work out how to cope with this phenomenon at both an international and a national level. As will be argued in the rest of this chapter, society may well have moved from being secular to what some are calling postsecular, and it is in this context that we need to understand how religion is to be involved in the public square.
In the first section that follows we look more closely at the debate about secularization in order to identify the characteristics of the postsecular context. We then move on to examine specific issues and questions that arise from this context, both for those with a faith commitment and for those who understand themselves as secular. What will emerge from this examination is an identification of the conditions required if there is to be genuine engagement between the two, notably the capacity and willingness of people to stand back from their immediate commitments and to be more reflexive in their approach. (Reflexivity is more than simply being reflective; it involves taking a critical distance in the light of encounters with other traditions, while also working towards a greater level of self-awareness.) As the argument unfolds it will be seen that the concept of reflexivity itself raises further questions and is not to be taken at face value. It does however lead us to the crucial issue of how it is possible for us to change and develop our self-understanding and to learn to see things differently, both of which seem essential if we are to get beyond the polarization between the religious and the secular that is now in danger of dominating public culture, and can also help to make sense of the blurring of boundaries between the two that is the other aspect of life in the postsecular.
Habermas and the postsecular
We will now give more concentrated attention to arguments about what is known as the postsecular and, in particular, to the recent writings of the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. His work is significant for this discussion in that, having previously adopted something like the more widely accepted division of public and private characteristic of the liberal settlement – in other words, that matters of faith should remain in the private realm and must always give way to public reason when political decisions are being made – he has shifted ground in recent years and now appears to be acknowledging a greater role for religion in the public sphere.
Clearly, for the suggestion that any society has now become postsecular to make sense, that society must already have been secular. On one level, then, the debate centres on secularization theory from within the discipline of sociology and whether this still holds good. Is it the case that religion is making a comeback of some sort and, even if this is true, does it have direct implications for the relationship between faith and the public sphere? Let us look at some of the detail on this.
We draw first of all on an article by Alessandro Ferrara,7 which aims to open up this debate by considering Habermas’s recent work. Ferrara suggests that there are three distinct meanings of secularism and thus of the processes of secularization. The first is political secularism. The exercise of legitimate state power takes place in secular terms. This allows citizens to exercise their religious freedom, but on the understanding that there is a clear separation between Church and state and that matters of faith are not allowed to play a part in the public political realm.
The second is social secularism. This recognizes that in modern societies, religious communities cease to influence law, politics, education and public life in general and become functionally specialized sub-groups, or communities of like-minded believers. People are less likely to refer to religious beliefs in a whole range of other activities. Religiously motivated action becomes more circumscribed and restricted. This distinction between political and social secularism is useful as, in some societies, the political process proceeds at a faster pace than the social one. Secularism in the first sense does not lead automatically and irrevocably to secularism in the second sense, as people may still experience faith as a personal influence that affects their behaviour and public activity even though the state no longer takes this into account.
A third meaning of secularism has been identified by Charles Taylor.8 This relates to the actual experience of believing, or what it feels like now to be a person of faith. What may well be happening through secularization is the move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic, to one where it is understood to be one option among others, and often not the easiest one to embrace. This would certainly seem to describe the situation in the UK, for instance. So belief and non-belief are seen less as rival and incommensurable theories and more as different life choices, different ways of being in the world. Thus the pre-secular world is one in which it is taken for granted that life is given value and meaning by reference to some external or transcendent reality, but in Taylor’s interpretation of secularism this shared framework of understanding has disappeared and individuals know that they have to choose and that they could have chosen otherwise. Taylor goes further, arguing that the current framework of reference relates to notions of human flourishing and that these require no transcendent goal or support. Faith is simply one option among many, and this changes the actual experience of being a religious person.
If even this era is now coming to a close, exactly which aspects of secularism can be seen to be under challenge? Habermas extends the particular interpretations of the sociological concept before going on to answer this question, and we need to take note of these interpretations in order to see the full picture. In relation to the specific argument that there is a close connection between social modernization and secularization, Habermas raises three considerations.
First, progress in the fields of science and technology promote an anthropocentric or human-centred understanding of a ‘disenchanted’ world, as events can be explained in causal terms – so any reference to God as some sort of transcendent presence becomes superfluous. This approach is difficult to reconcile with a theistic or metaphysical understanding of the world.
Second, as social functions become increasingly differentiated, so churches and other religious organizations lose their control over such spheres as law, public welfare, education, culture and politics and have to restrict themselves to internal matters which are seen as essentially private. Hence perhaps the recent focus within church circles on liturgy, church organization and issues of sexuality.
Third, the movement to a post-industrial society leads to higher levels of welfare and increased social security, thus easing the pressures of dealing with uncontrolled contingencies through faith in a higher or cosmic power.9 Is it then the case that any or each of these is either being reversed or undermined in some way so that one might talk about a postsecular society?
One of the problems with secularization is that the theory appears to be founded on a European experience which differs, for instance, from that in the USA, let alone in the Middle East. Is Europe a model for the rest of the world, or is it rather the exception? Once again, Habermas identifies three developments that appear to challenge the secularism argument.
First is the missionary expansion of the major world religions, and this includes Hinduism and Buddhism as well as the more obvious advances of Islam and forms of evangelical Christianity. Second is the fundamental radicalization of many of these religious movements, which claim either to reject the modern world or to successfully withdraw from it. Third is the apparent capacity of some of these movements to mobilize...