Creating Community Cohesion

Religion, Media and Multiculturalism

D. Herbert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349314508, 9780230236455
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312723
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Using approaches from sociology, media and religious studies, David Herbert compares recent public controversies involving or implicating religion in the UK (England and Northern Ireland), the Netherlands and France.

1

Troubled Multiculturalisms and Disrupted Secularities: Religion and Social Integration ‘Crises’ in North Western Europe in Comparative Perspective

The Dutch democracy will never be the same. Gone is innocence, gone is the way things were

(anonymous statement on an improvised memorial to Pim Fortuyn, in Margry 2007: 124)

Secular assumptions about freedom, authority, choice, and obligation – assumptions that underpin French political discourse about religion and French and European law pertaining to religious freedom – preclude the public intelligibility of the kind of religiosity inhabited by … Muslim citizens who are part of the French Islamic revival

(Fernando 2009: 20)

Asian and White communities lead separate and parallel lives, and have very few ways of learning from and understanding one another’s cultures and beliefs

(Burnley Task Force 2001: 7)

Religion is the context in which language about forgiveness has probably been most explicitly institutionalised

(Wuthnow 2000: 127)

Although a persistent sectarianism complicates, and often impedes, the advancement of multicultural, and particularly anti-racist, agendas, I would argue that they also open up the possibility of destabilising embedded sectarianism

(Geoghegan 2008: 190)

One might say that the early history of secularism is almost entirely dominated by Western societies. However, the same cannot be said of its later history

(Bhargava 2009: 108)

These quotations give a sense of the range of themes addressed in this book. Since the turn of the millennium, European societies have been shaken by the re-emergence of religion as a contested factor in public life, arguably part of a worldwide pattern, but taking distinctive form in this most secular part of the world (Norris and Inglehart 2011: 85–9). In this introduction, and again in the conclusion, the European cases which lie at the heart of this book will be situated in the context of broader global developments, in order to better understand the politics of religion in today’s religiously diverse but differently secular societies.

Amongst the most affected societies has been that of the Netherlands, previously ‘long regarded as an exemplary case of successful multiculturalism’ (Koopmans 2010: 2). While the murder of erstwhile sociology professor, media personality and politician Pim Fortuyn (first quotation above) was committed by an animal rights activist, it was his public criticism of what he saw as the failure of immigrants to adopt the liberal values prized by Dutch society, and in particular of the dangers of Islam to liberalism, that struck a chord with a sizeable portion of the Dutch public, whose outpourings in the aftermath of his violent death expressed a sense that they had been denied a public voice on these issues.

Conversely, the second quotation refers to the denial of a public voice of another kind – a contention that in France, with Europe’s largest Muslim population (approximately 5 million), public discourse renders unintelligible kind of religiosity that Fernando argues is chosen by the Muslim women who were the subjects of her research. Lives, then, are lived in mutual unintelligibility – but of a different and more subtle kind of separation to the spatial segregation that the Clarke report on the disturbances in Burnley in the summer of 2001 (the third quotation) controversially claims were the root cause of that unrest. And yet religion, often framed as a cause of conflict in contemporary societies, can also be seen as a source for reconciliation, as the fourth quotation suggests. This is a capacity of religious communities that the ‘community cohesion’ policy, developed in England in the aftermath of the Burnley and other riots, attempted to harness; controversially, because of doubts about the analysis of the riots underlying the policy, concerns about the co-option of ‘faith communities’ and neglect of other factors underlying the social tensions that erupted in rioting: social ‘exclusion’, inequality and racist agitation.

Post-millennial concerns with social integration overlay and interact with older patterns of social division and social ordering, as the fifth quotation from an evaluation of anti-racist work in Belfast, Northern Ireland, illustrates. The sixth quotation picks up on this theme of social ordering, referring to traditions of secularism as ways of managing religious differences that were first developed in Europe, now spread globally, and raising the possibility of increasing understanding of issues of social integration, division and ordering through comparison of cases, both across Europe and beyond the European focus of this book.

Religious participation and the public role of religion: North Western European trends in comparative perspective

The main case studies examined are drawn from North Western Europe: two from different parts of the UK (England, Chapter 2, and Northern Ireland, Chapter 5) and the other two from the Netherlands (Chapter 3) and France (Chapter 4). In some senses, especially in a global perspective, they appear quite similar: all are post-industrial welfare democracies, with post-1950s, post-colonial histories of immigration (though mostly more recent in the case of Northern Ireland). They share a common Christian, mixed Catholic and Protestant heritage (more Protestant in the British case, more Catholic in the French; more evenly though differently divided in Northern Ireland and the Netherlands). But, again with the partial exception of Northern Ireland, they are amongst the most secular societies on earth, if one considers either levels of religious activity or attitudes towards the public role of religion amongst the majority of the population (Norris and Inglehart 2011: 85–9).

Data from the World Values Survey (WVS 2008) show that since 1983 (when the survey began), both the proportion of people regularly participating in core religious activities, and the subjective rating of the importance of religion in the individual’s life, have declined markedly in most European societies. This contrasts with much of the rest of the world, for while there is an overall downward trend in regular religious participation, initially higher rates have declined only modestly in most cases, and, in the odd case, actually increased. But perhaps more important for grasping the distinctiveness of Western European societies, WVS data also show that there are large differences between much of Europe and much of the rest of the world concerning views on the proper influence of religion in public life. For example, in 2005–8 about a third of Americans and almost half of Brazilians agreed or strongly agreed with the proposition that ‘politicians who do not believe in God are not fit for public office’. This proportion increases to just over 50 per cent in South Africa, India and Turkey (formally ‘secular’ republics), and rises to over 70 per cent in Indonesia (the largest democracy in the Muslim-majority world). In contrast, when this question was last asked in Europe (in 1999), it received only a small percentage of affirmative responses (less than 4 per cent in the Netherlands and Sweden, around 10 per cent in Britain and France), a positive response rate so low that it was dropped altogether from the 2005–8 questionnaire. So it would seem that European populations share a more secularised attitude – in the sense of their understanding of the role and authority of religion in public life, if it is accepted that this is what this question accesses – than is common, or at least prevalent, elsewhere.

However, this distinctive North Western European pattern of secularity (similar attitudes and sharp declines in religious participation are also found in Germany, Belgium and across Scandinavia) does not, or does not uniformly, extend to religious minorities living within those societies. For example, van Tubergen (2006) found that British and Dutch immigrants (including a range of religious groups, and some 12 per cent with no religious affiliation) had a weekly religious attendance rate of 34 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively (ibid.: 10), compared with national rates of 17 per cent and 12 per cent (WVS 2008), suggesting considerable differences between migrant and majority populations. Such a difference is not found, for example, in the US, where the figures are 35 per cent (immigrants) and 36 per cent (national population) respectively. Neither, interestingly, and a point to which we shall return in Chapter 4, does this difference appear to be present in France, at least for the largest religious minority, where weekly religious attendance for both Catholics and Muslims stood at about 10 per cent in the mid-2000s (Allen 2006).

In Britain and the Netherlands, however, the difference between the majority and Muslim populations in particular seems to be large, and is confirmed by other studies: Güveli and Platt (2010: 1027), for example, report weekly attendance rates for Dutch and British Muslims of 67 per cent and 47 per cent, respectively, making weekly religious attendance amongst Muslims roughly four times higher than amongst the national population as a whole, in both countries. Furthermore, where it is available (the data for minority religious attendance is patchy and recent, compared with that for majorities), evidence suggests that religious minorities are not, or at least not uniformly, following majority tendencies towards declining religious attendance. Thus, Güveli and Platt (2010: 1021) found that, amongst British Muslims, neither length of (British) education nor period of residence in the UK were associated with declining religious attendance, while Maliepaard et al. (2012) found that amongst Dutch Muslims, whereas data before 1998 suggested a ‘a linear trend towards secularization over time and over generations’, evidence from 1998–2006 shows a ‘striking’ revival among the second generation, leading them to conclude that

Forces of secularization such as educational attainment and generational replacement gradually lose their predictive power.

(2012: 359)

Simple religious attendance rates do not necessarily tell us anything about the importance of religion in identity or its salience in public life (although they do, arguably, tell us something about the pool of possible support on which religious mobilisation might draw). However, surveys also indicate differences in these areas too. For example, in terms of the primary source of self-identity (‘Do you think of yourself first as (name of country’s people) or first as a (Muslim or Christian or Hindu?)’), 59 per cent of British and Germans, and 83 per cent of French (general national sample) indicated ‘nationality’, compared with 24 per cent, 33 per cent and 14 per cent choosing ‘religion’. This compares with a priority for religion amongst 81, 66 and 46 per cent of British, German and French Muslims, with 7, 13 and 42 per cent choosing nationality (Pew 2006: 18–19). Amongst European Muslims then, religion would seem to be considerably more important as a source of identity than amongst the majority population in these cases. Again, although American Muslim-only data is not available, this contrast is likely to be less sharp, because a higher proportion of the general US population prioritises religious identity (42 per cent, the same as for French Muslims), compared with 48 per cent choosing nationality (ibid.).

Caution is needed in drawing conclusions (about national loyalty, for example) from this single survey; logically, the fact that one identifies with religion first says nothing, necessarily, about how strong one’s national loyalty might be – a point backed empirically by a British study which found a strong and robust ‘positive relation between self-identification with British society and religious attendance’ for British Muslims, concluding:

Despite debates about ‘oppositional’ cultures … religious practice in the UK would appear to have an integrative role in terms of destination country identification.

(Güveli and Platt 2011: 1031)

It is also important to underline that these findings show differences of tendency within populations rather than categorical distinctions – it is impossible to predict with any accuracy any individual’s attitude to these matters simply by knowing his or her religion, as both majority and minority populations show large variations. Nonetheless, taken together, it seems that survey evidence suggests that North Western European majority populations are globally exceptional in the degree of their secularity (religious attendance and rating of the importance of religion), a feature not shared with their religious minority populations, notably Muslims (where most research has been done), in most cases (noting the possible exception of French Muslims).

What to make of this? First, I suggest that this difference in religious observance and importance of religious identification may be relevant for understanding the tensions concerning social integration and ‘disruption[s] of the multicultural peace’ (Uitermark and Gielen 2010: 1130) that North Western European societies have recently witnessed. To go further, to discover whether these differences are indicative of a broader range of value differences will require more evidence, and this line of enquiry will be pursued in the Dutch case (Chapter 3). Second, I shall suggest that such evidence can be used to develop Jürgen Habermas’ designation of contemporary Western European societies as distinctively ‘post-secular’ (2008: 19). Before I do so, however, it will be useful to sketch the basic aims and methods of the study.

Aims, methods and ‘disruptions of the multicultural peace’

This book is concerned with social cohesion/integration and its disruption in contemporary multicultural, multi-religious societies. It will attempt to make sense of four clusters of such disruptions – events and their consequences – in England, the Netherlands, France and Northern Ireland, and of two related but contrasting attempts (English – community cohesion, Northern Irish – social/civil peace process) to recover from/get beyond them. Hence, it aims to contribute to building a sound basis for reflection on how best to go about creating or rebuilding trust and co-operation in the aftermath of such disruptions, and in anticipation of their likely ongoing recurrence – as the total elimination of such conflicts is, in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, a modern myth (2011: 429; 1999). The book will have a particular focus on the role of religion in these disruptive and (re-)integrative processes, and, as part of a series on non-governmental public action, on the role of non-state actors and on how ‘the public’/‘publics’ and their actions are best understood in these contexts.

By focusing on religion there is no intention to imply that religion is necessarily central to societal cohesion/disruption. Partly, there is a focus on religion because the author is a sociologist of religion, and interested in the changing articulation of religion, society and politics over time and in different places. But the focus on religion is also because the role of religion has (arguably, see below) become publicly controversial in many societies in the last two to three decades in ways that earlier generations of social scientists had not anticipated, and because religion is often implicated in – if not necessarily straightforwardly the cause of – contemporary disruptions of the multicultural peace (Uitermark and Gielen 2010: 1130). Hence, it has become of concern and interest to non-specialists in religion also, and of broader public concern.

The actual extent to which religion is the cause of such disruptions – and, conversely, a source of reconciliation (Brewer et al. 2011) – is something to be critically investigated. It may be that other factors – from the way the mass media circulate images of religion to ‘structural’ factors creating inequalities and political and social exclusion – actually underlie such apparently cultural or religious disruptions. On the other hand, it may not; or it may be some interaction between these factors. As far as possible, and given that the author starts with an interest in religion and how it acts and is acted on socially, I try to keep an open mind about the relationships involved and attempt to map their form, influence and inter-relation in the cases discussed here.

The core method used is ‘retroductive analysis’ (Danemark et al. 2002: 96–106), which means an attempt to find the most plausible explanation for the ‘multicultural disruptions’ examined by triangulating a range of sources, considering alternative explanations and developing new ones where necessary. Rather than trying to explain exactly (historically) what happened in particular cases (e.g. how the riots in B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Troubled Multiculturalisms and Disrupted Secularities: Religion and Social Integration ‘Crises’ in North Western Europe in Comparative Perspective
• 2. ‘Community Cohesion’ and English Disruptions of the Multicultural Peace: The Northern Riots, White ‘Backlash’ and the ‘Evocation of a Faith Sector’
• 3. Paradise Lost? The Collapse of Dutch Multiculturalism and the Birth of Islamophobic Post-Liberalism
• 4. Religion and Social Integration in France
• 5. Northern Ireland: Sectarianism, Civil Society and Democratic Deepening
• 6. Religion and Social Integration ‘Crises’ in North Western Europe: Some Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index