Religion and Change in Modern Britain

Linda Woodhead, Rebecca Catto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136475009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book offers a fully up-to-date and comprehensive guide to religion in Britain since 1945. A team of leading scholars provide a fresh analysis and overview, with a particular focus on diversity and change. They examine:

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• relations between religious and secular beliefs and institutions
• the evolving role and status of the churches
• the growth and 'settlement' of non-Christian religious communities
• the spread and diversification of alternative spiritualities
• religion in welfare, education, media, politics and law
• theoretical perspectives on religious change.

The volume presents the latest research, including results from the largest-ever research initiative on religion in Britain, the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme. Survey chapters are combined with detailed case studies to give both breadth and depth of coverage. The text is accompanied by relevant photographs and a companion website.

1 Controversies as a lens on change

Malory Nye and Paul Weller

Conflicts and controversies over religion offer a useful lens onto wider developments in the post-war period. This chapter charts the development of such controversies over time, showing how they have intensified in recent decades, and analysing them by considering their changing nature and the issues and parties involved. It shows that ‘cults’ or ‘New Religious Movements’ were the focus of public controversies in the 1960s and 1970s, but that from the 1980s, especially with the Rushdie Affair, attention shifted to Islam, issues of free speech, the question of how far religion could be publicly manifest, and what privileges and exemptions it could claim. Terrorism associated with religion, both Irish nationalist and Islamist, endures as a public and political concern. The chapter sets this in broader context, showing how in a society which is now Christian, secular and religiously plural the place and ‘rights’ of religion become complex and contested. Although there is a tendency to see religious conflict as something new, the chapter also mentions earlier historical examples – like the Gunpowder Plot – to show that violent conflict is hardly novel in British history. As in the Introduction and Chapter 12, it is noted that the tendency to see religion as uniquely violent – and to ignore the more common non-religious forms of violence, whether domestic/gender-based or political – is itself a viewpoint which grows out of secular–religious conflict.

Introduction

There are multiple strands that make up the landscape of religion in contemporary Britain, and there are a number of quite distinct trajectories of change (secularization, consumerism, migration/settlement and globalization, to name just a few) that have influenced this current process. Within this, the role played by controversies relating to religion and diversity is itself of significance – controversies have helped to create change and have also reflected the changes that have been occurring.

Therefore the aims of this chapter are largely directed in two ways. First, the controversies that we discuss have all been significant in their own right. They have been events that have shaped the public domain in some way, and have impacted in most cases directly on religious and cultural groups and communities in Britain (as well as on how others have viewed such groups). Second, controversies are very often a means by which we can understand the values of the wider society, in particular the ways in which we can see discourses of controversy being manifest around particular ideas, religious groups and activities (see Beckford 1985). On an historical level, the changing subjects of controversy can be indicators of changes in the wider social issues – which of course may relate to specific issues discussed elsewhere in this book, such as secularism and the change in organized (majority and minority) religions.

An important issue to note at this stage is that there is nothing new about controversy. Religion and religious differences have been controversial in Britain for centuries, and are very likely to continue to be. Indeed, even the dynamics of particular controversies tend to share some discernible characteristics, since much of what becomes controversial revolves around what are taken as the ‘normative’ or majority values of the larger group, and how minorities and dissidents from the ‘norm’ may and do express themselves. To put this simply, there have been moral panics in British history for centuries, likewise minorities have been demonized, and differences between the religious majority and minorities (both religious and non-religious) have always been involved in conflict. This chapter will consider what, if anything, is new about recent controversies.

The chapter will take account of controversies across Britain, including, for example, those that relate to sectarian conflict (between Protestants and Catholics) as, for example, in Northern Ireland and Scotland. To understand these, and also the broader context of controversies in Britain, we need to take account of a long history of religion and difference.

The themes of this chapter interact with a number of the other chapters of this volume. In order to understand some of the particular events we need to have in mind the background materials of both Christianity (Chapter 2) and other religious groups in Britain (Chapters 3 and 4), together with the changing nature of religion and faith in the current time (Chapter 5), the influence of the media and media audiences on conflict and controversy (Chapter 7), and the legal framework through which much controversy is mediated (Chapter 9).

TEXT BOX 1

Setting the scene

In July 2009 an exhibition at the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art took an unconventional approach to engaging the viewer with the text of the Christian Bible. At the centre of an exhibition was an open Bible, together with a box of pens and a notice saying: ‘If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it.’ Alongside this was a video installation of a young woman ripping pages out of a Bible and stuffing them into her knickers, bra and mouth (Wade 2009). The stated aims of the artists, Anthony Schrag and David Malone, were to encourage the reclamation of the Bible as a sacred text by those who felt excluded, particularly lesbians and gays. However, a number of Christian churches and organizations expressed concern and disdain for the way the exhibition had encouraged a desecration of the sacred text in the name of art. The exhibition was picketed by various Christian protestors, and the story of the exhibition and its opposition was widely reported in the local and national media.

On 5 February 2011, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany. In the speech, he argued that what he called ‘the doctrine of state multiculturalism’ in Britain had ‘encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream’ (Cameron 2011). This led the media to headline his speech ‘Failure of multiculturalism’ (although in fact Cameron did not himself use this phrase). What he went on to say, though, was that ‘we’ had ‘failed to provide a vision of society to which [the different cultures] … feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values’ (Cameron 2011). Very pointedly, the remainder of the speech was an outline by Cameron of his vision for the more successful integration, specifically, of Muslims and Islam in Britain, through a combination of what he called ‘muscular liberalism’, ‘active participation in society’ and a side-lining of extremism. The speech echoed comments made by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel a few months before about the ‘utter failure of multiculturalism’ in Germany.

Religious controversy from the Reformation to the 1970s

A key historical element underpinning much controversy over religion in Britain is the close historical relationship between Protestantism and ‘Britishness’. This developed in the post-Reformation period, and one of its by-products was a powerful current of anti-Catholicism (Marrotti 2005). For hundreds of years Catholics as a group (as distinct from individual Catholics) were seen as potentially disloyal ‘fifth columnists’ with religiopolitical allegiances to the Papacy and other predominantly Catholic foreign powers beyond the boundaries of the national community.

Such tropes continued to have strong resonance in England and Wales until reforming legislation in the nineteenth century removed from Catholics (and others, such as Jews and Free Church Christians) the majority of the civil and legal disabilities with which they had lived for centuries (see Larsen 1999; Salbstein 1982). Nevertheless, in what is still a powerful symbol of the relationship between Britishness and Protestantism, under the Act of Succession anyone wishing to retain their succession to the throne is still prevented from embracing Roman Catholicism, while the Royal Marriages Act 1772 prevents the succession of anyone who marries a Roman Catholic.

In Northern Ireland such tropes continued to have resonance into the twentieth century and, indeed, continue down to the present. This has been through an intertwining of various religious, political and ideological currents in the struggle for Irish independence by Irish Nationalists and Republicans and resistance to it on the part of Unionists and Loyalists (Bruce 1986). These struggles first resulted in the establishment of the Irish Free State (1922–1937) and then the Republic of Ireland. Violent conflict re-emerged in the late 1960s during the decades-long ‘Troubles’ (McSweeney 1989) that followed the violence meted out to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. There followed a period of armed conflict involving Republican and Loyalist paramilitary forces, the forces of the British state and of the Northern Ireland province, during which over 3,000 people were killed until a political settlement with the principal parties to the conflict was reached in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (see Chapter 9 for more information).

The potent admixture of religion and national identity that has come to be known as ‘sectarianism’ (Liechty and Clegg 2001) can also be found in Scotland, although its extent is hotly debated (see Walls and Williams 2003, 2005; and Bruce et al. 2005 for differing interpretations). In England and Wales, generally speaking, the ‘temperature’ around religion had ‘cooled’ for much of the twentieth century. When, in the 1960s, the notion and phenomenon of secularization came into public, political and religious consciousness it was often assumed that, with the exception of Northern Ireland, the continued privatization of religion would mean that big religious controversies would increasingly become something of the past. But in Scotland, the significance of conflicting religious identities, particularly in the west (around Glasgow), has continued to belie this perspective – to the extent that even as recently as 2003 the Scottish government added a clause to the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003 creating a defence for individuals and groups from aggravation based on religious prejudice (which was largely targeted at sectarian Protestant–Catholic issues, see Scottish Executive 2006). Such sectarianism is strongly linked to the footballing rivalry between the Glasgow teams of Celtic and Rangers, and in April 2011 parcel bombs were sent to the Celtic manager Neil Lennon, along with two other high-profile Celtic supporters.

Even in the so-called secular 1960s and 1970s, controversies over religion did occasionally flare up, including in England and Wales. When this happened it was usually in relation to the actual and perceived beliefs and practices of religious groups described variously in academic, popular and religious literature as ‘sects’ or ‘cults’, which in academic discourse later became generally referred to as New Religious Movements or ‘NRMs’ (Barker 1982, 1995). When ‘sects’ were spoken of, this often referred to groups with nineteenth- and/or early twentieth-century origins which had some contested relationship with the broader Christian tradition – such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and Christian Scientists. Controversies from time to time emerged around the refusal of Jehovah’s Witnesses to accept blood transfusions and Christian Scientists’ preference for using what they understand to be Divine Healing as compared with medical science. Since, in some cases, individuals (and especially legal minors) have died when their lives might have been saved by the use of blood transfusion or other medical means, the competing moral values involved have given rise to controversy and debate in the media and among health professionals.

With the ‘turn to the East’ among the youth of the late 1960s and the 1970s (Leech 1973), controversies also started to emerge around groups that were less culturally familiar and/or linked to Christianity. These are the ‘cults’ of popular imagination, and included the group ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness), popularly known as the ‘Hare Krishnas’ (Knott 1986; Dwyer and Cole 2007), whose devotees emerged into public consciousness dancing and chanting in the high streets of major British cities, and through association with George Harrison and the Beatles. In time ISKCON has become less noticed on the public level, largely through its establishment in Britain as a specific group within the broader (ethnically Indian) Hindu population (see Nye 2001). A number of other more ‘quietist’ (that is, resembling the Christian movement advocating withdrawal into contemplation of God) Hindu and Buddhist associated groups and traditions have slowly become established in Britain since the 1960s, often without any significant controversy (see Chapter 3).

More serious concerns developed in the 1970s about other groups that, as traced by Robert Zaehner in books such as Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe (Zaehner 1972) and Our Savage God (Zaehner 1974), appeared to mix a ‘pop’ understanding of Eastern mysticism with an emergent drug culture, and who were attracted to the idea of being able to go beyond conventional understandings of good and evil. Of these, the most prominent was probably the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Movement (later renamed the Osho Movement), based around its charismatic founder Rajneesh. This movement achieved a certain notoriety, largely due to its combination of forms of Hindu mysticism with counter-cultural values, including liberal and liberating attitudes to sexuality.

During the same period, other Christian-related groups – such as the Children of God (now known as The Family International) and the Unification Church (Chryssides 1991) popularly known as the ‘Moonies’ (and now formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) – became a focus for controversies over religion. In both cases, issues about religious freedom came to the fore as discussed in James Beckford’s classic study Cult Controversies (1985).

The international dimensions of these ‘cultic’ movements made them more controversial. Events like the mass suicides and murders among the largely Pentecostalist Christian followers of the Reverend Jim Jones (the Peoples Temple) in Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978 (see Maaga 1998), and the deaths of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists at their ranch outside Waco in April 1993 (Tabor and Gallagher 1997), and the poison gas attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo group in Tokyo in March 1995 (Reader 1996), gave considerable notoriety to the whole area of alternative religiosity. In Britain (as elsewhere), they created public and media conceptions of stereotypical ‘cultish’ attributes and behaviour. Although scientifically discredited, the idea spread that impressionable people could be ‘brainwashed’, and a minor industry of ‘deprogramming’ developed, which could entail the forcible mental and physical isolation of individuals from their former group membership (see Barker 1995). The ‘cult controversies’ also involved debate around the limits of freedom of religion in social and legal systems, as when the British Member of the European Parliament Richard Cotterell (1984) attempted unsuccessfully to bring in European legislation specifically to limit the activities of New Religious Movements.

Controversies since the 1980s over free speech

By the end of the twentieth century, these New Religious Movement controversies had largely receded in Britain (though not in many parts of mainland Europe). They have been largely replaced by controversies around Muslims and Islam and other forms of so-called religious ‘radicalism’ and/or ‘extremism’. Academic study has shifted accordingly. One way of understanding this shift could be in terms of changes in the way that the phenomena referred to as the ‘secular’ and ‘secularization’ are playing out in social debate and academic understanding (see Chapter 12). At a time when ‘secularization’ was generally thought to be in the ascendant, political and academic focus ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of plates
• Notes on contributors
• PART 1 Changing religious forms
• PART 2 Wider influences
• PART 3 Theoretical perspectives
• Index