Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves?

The Gendered Triangle of Religion, Secularity and Spirituality

Anna Fedele, Kim E. Knibbe, Anna Fedele, Kim E. Knibbe

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429853180
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Teología y religión
• Thema: Teología

Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach.

The book examines how 'spirituality' has emerged as a relatively 'silent' category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion approach the contributors analyse the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy to Canada, the United States and Mexico. The chapters explore the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, as well as the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality.

This volume will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as scholars in other disciplines who seek to understand the role of spirituality in creating the complex gendered dynamics of modern societies.

1 Feminist spirituality as lived religion

How UK feminists forge religio-spiritual lives

Kristin Aune¹

How do feminists in the United Kingdom view spirituality and religion? What are their religious or spiritual attitudes, beliefs, and practices? What role do spirituality and religion play in feminists’ lives? This essay presents findings from an interview-based study of 30 feminists. It identifies three characteristics of feminists’ religio-spiritual approaches: they are de-churched, are relational, and emphasize practice. These features, I argue, call for a new approach to feminists’ relationship to religion and spirituality, so I propose conceptualizing feminist spirituality as lived religion.

Just as feminisms are diverse and the term “feminism” is continually interrogated, defining “religion” and “spirituality” has preoccupied scholars for over a century. Sociologists of religion have taken two broad approaches. Substantive definitions seek to interrogate what religion is: its essence or substance. Belief in something otherworldly is emphasized, often one or more deities who govern or intervene in the world. Tylor (1873), for instance, held that religion was “belief in Spiritual Beings.” Functional definitions explain what religion does: its function in society, for instance, providing a worldview that helps people cope with questions of meaning, or bringing people together in worship. Luckmann’s (1967, 49) notion of religion as “the transcendence of biological nature by the human organism” is a well-known functional definition.

For most scholars, “spirituality” is an aspect of religion. But in post-industrial contexts, some argue that non-institutional spiritualities deserve attention apart from “religion.” Observing that many people refer to themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” some have taken this “emic” (insider) notion of spirituality and made it an “etic” (outsider) one too (Vincett and Woodhead 2009; Wuthnow 2001).

However, a group of scholars have begun employing the term “lived religion” to encompass religion and spirituality. Like them, I use “spirituality,” “religion,” and “religio-spiritual” interchangeably when discussing feminists’ approaches (see McGuire 2008, 6). I believe distinguishing religion from spirituality is unhelpful analytically and does not reflect the narratives of the feminists interviewed for this study. While some of them viewed spirituality as more open and indeterminate than religion (religion connoting a misogynistic institution), others thought differently, experiencing spirituality within religion, seeing no need for either, or possessing a spiritual worldview interpretable (cf. Luckmann 1967) as religious in itself. Their experiences cannot be differentiated as either religious or spiritual. But treating the terms as synonymous does not obfuscate the need for discussion of the light my findings shed on how to define religion and spirituality. So after outlining characteristics of feminists’ religio-spiritual approaches, I will suggest that the concept of lived religion captures their approaches well, and will prove influential in taking forward analysis of religion in late modern societies.

Feminist sociological literature on religion

This research speaks to three themes in feminist sociological literature on religion. The first equates feminism with secularism and secularization. The second links feminism to women’s turn to alternative forms of spirituality. The third concerns religious feminisms. These trajectories are partly chronological—they move historically from a “feminism vs. religion” position to the feminist turn to spirituality and then to religious feminisms—but they are also overlapping discourses about religion that continue to be articulated in academic literature.

Feminism vs. religion: secularism and secularization

As women’s and gender studies developed from the 1970s, its scholars often portrayed religion negatively, as an obstacle to feminism. In women’s movement histories and feminist texts, religion is either absent or treated negatively, as a patriarchal impediment to liberation (Braude 2004; Llewellyn and Trzebiatowska 2013). Consequently, the study of religion is at best a marginal field within gender studies; the study of gender in the sociology of religion is also relatively new (Woodhead 2001). This neglect of religion betrays secularist assumptions (that gender equality is antithetical to religion, and that religions should not be given power in the public sphere to control women’s lives), Reilly (2011) and Mahmood (2005) argue, secularist assumptions that derive partly from liberal feminism’s genesis in the Enlightenment rejection of non-scientific meta-narratives. Liberal feminist views of agency as autonomy and resistance to patriarchal norms often contradict religious understandings of agency (Mahmood 2005). Feminism’s secularist assumptions derive also from feminism’s socialist or Marxist inheritance, wherein religion is rejected as a form of false consciousness blinding women to their oppression or teaching that freedom is for a utopian afterlife (Braidotti 2008).

Many social theorists, like feminists, consider modernity the antithesis of religion. Secularization theorists argue that modernization brought about democracy, egalitarianism, and religion’s demise (Wilson 1966). As the revitalized nature of religion in today’s world calls secularization theories into question (P. Berger 1999), secularism too is being interrogated. Not only is secularism a historical product of modernity, the eventual outcome of Protestant Christianity prioritizing personal choice in religious matters (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008), but the assumption that secularism is the superior feminist position is being called into question as women exercise agency through religion, and because it marginalizes religious women, labeling them victims of religious oppression (Reilly 2011).

Feminism played a role in the process of secularization in Western Europe and North America, historians and social scientists argue. Secularization is “the process whereby religious thinking, practices and institutions lose social significance” (Wilson 1966, xiv). Religion remains, but only in the private sphere. Insofar as secularization occurred, gender scholars argue that men and women encountered it differently because of their different public/private positioning (Aune, Sharma and Vincett 2008; Brown 2001, 2007; Woodhead 2005). During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more women than men stayed religious because they were occupied by domestic work in the private sphere. But women’s lives diversified in the late twentieth century, giving women freedom beyond the private (religious) sphere. Second-wave feminism raised women’s aspirations beyond a female role to diverse options—motherhood, marriage, sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage, employment, travel, education, and so on. In the 1960s, Brown (2001, 192) argues, “British women secularized the construction of their identity, and the churches started to lose them.” Brown believes that feminist narratives of female freedom partly explain the steep decline in institutional Christianity (e.g., churchgoing, baptisms, and confirmations). For Brown (2001, 192), “the keys to understanding secularization in Britain are the simultaneous de-pietization of femininity and the de-feminization of piety.”

Oral history interviews endorse Brown’s thesis that feminism supported British women’s religious disaffiliation (Browne 2013). Quantitative evidence from the UK and US illustrates that women whose lives diversify from wifehood and motherhood are less likely to stay at church or report feeling close to God (Marler 2008; Woodhead 2005). Secularization is “almost entirely de-Christianization” (Brown 2007, 394) in this body of work, which connects the diversification of women’s lives with church decline.

The feminist turn to spirituality

While feminism encouraged de-Christianization, it precipitated alternative spirituality. Previously called “New Age,” Sointu and Woodhead (2008, 259) define holistic spiritualities as “those forms of practice involving the body, which have become increasingly visible since the 1980s, and that have as their goal the attainment of wholeness and well-being of ‘body, mind, and spirit’.” Complementary medicine, shiatsu, and Wicca are examples. Proportions of European and North American populations actively committed to holistic spiritualities stand at around 2–5 percent, while a larger 10–20 percent see themselves as “spiritual not religious” (Sointu and Woodhead 2008). There is a large literature on the growth of alternative spiritualities in the US (Roof 1999), Europe (Houtman and Aupers 2007), and the UK (Heelas and Woodhead 2005). These spiritualities are often described as creating a “spiritual marketplace” (Roof 1999) reflecting the consumerism of late modernity, or as individualistic and narcissistic (Bellah et al. 1985). Sointu and Woodhead consider the individualistic charge unfair, since their focus on the self is a corrective to traditional notions of femininity as self-sacrifice. They are popular with women because

holistic spiritualities align with traditional spheres and representations of femininity, while simultaneously supporting and encouraging a move away from selfless to expressive selfhood. By endorsing and sanctioning “living life for others” and “living life for oneself,” holistic spiritualities offer a way of negotiating dilemmas of selfhood that face many women—and some men—in late modern contexts.

(Sointu and Woodhead 2008, 259)

Moreover, alternative spiritualities are relational, directed toward others as well as enriching women’s neglected selves.

Since the 1970s, feminism has been associated with alternative spiritualities; this is the form of religion/spirituality that feminist scholars have shown most interest in. Practitioners argued that rather than getting rid of the concept of the divine, women needed a female divine figure to reaffirm women’s bodies, which were traditionally denigrated as impure or purely sexual. From Carol Christ’s 1978 conference address “Why women need the Goddess,” feminist spirituality spread through a range of pagan, Wiccan, and goddess-focused spiritualities, as Eller’s (1993) American study demonstrates. In Heelas and Woodhead’s (2005) study of Kendal, a northern English town where 2–3 percent of the population were involved in alternative spiritual activities (against a weekly churchgoing rate of 7.9 percent), 80 percent of participants in New Age spirituality were women. Brown suggests (2007, 414), perhaps prematurely, that today “the New Age … is the site for the new femininity of British religion.” These British examples fit within a large North American feminist literature that sees holistic spirituality as a way in which feminist and religio-spiritual identities can be aligned (e.g., H. Berger 1999; Eller 1993; Salomonsen 2002).

Religious feminisms

Less visible in feminist literature is the third theme, religiously based feminisms. These have begun to be investigated in the twenty-first century and include Ingersoll’s (2003) research with the American evangelical Christian feminist movement, McGinty’s (2007) with Swedish feminist converts to Islam, Zwissler’s (2007) with Canadian feminist social justice activists, and Klassen’s (2009) essay collection on third-wave feminists and spirituality. The few European studies include Daggers’ (2002) on the 1970s and 1980s British Christian feminist movement. Fedele’s (2013) anthropological journeys with pilgrims visiting French Catholic shrines to Mary Magdalene reveal the complex ways women fuse Catholic spirituality with feminist notions of the “sacred feminine” and neo-pagan and indigenous traditions. Vincett’s (2008) UK study of Christian and goddess feminists reveals a similar fusion of neo-pagan and Christian feminist spiritualities. These new studies show feminists using religious resources to negotiate and challenge gender inequalities within their religious traditions, personal lives, and societies.

The literature, then, posits three trajectories in feminists’ engagement with religion: feminist secularism and secularization, the feminist turn to spirituality, and religio-spiritual feminist groups. My study builds on, yet challenges, this literature. It also builds on an article in which I analyzed survey data (n = 1,265) on UK feminists’ religious and spiritual views (Aune 2011). Survey participants were asked, “Describe your religious and spiritual views (including none/atheist/agnostic).” Comparison with surveys of religious adherence revealed that these feminists are significantly less traditionally religious and somewhat more “spiritual” than the UK female population. Over half of the sample were atheist (39 percent) or had no religion (15 percent). Agnostics made up 15 percent. 11 percent supported a major world religion. Eight percent were spiritual (in a general sense or identifying with alternative spiritualities). The final 12 percent displayed three tendencies: merging or blurring positions (“spiritual atheist” or “Jewish agnostic”), difficulties in defining their religious views, or describing previous religious positions (“lapsed Catholic”). Asking why it might be that they were much less religious yet slightly more spiritual, I posited three explanations: feminism’s alignment with secularism, secularization and feminism’s role within it, and feminism’s association with alternative spiritualities. This essay develops that work through an analysis of interview data. While this study does not claim to produce generalizable findings, the data are rich and indicative of trends and patterns that should be explored further.

In this interview study of UK feminists, I argue that feminists’ religio-spiritual approaches should not simply be equated with secularism, secularization, or alternative spiritualities. Instead, feminists forge religio-spiritual lives in complex ways. The spiritual approaches of those I interviewed had three main characteristics: they are de-churched, are relational, and emphasize practice. Moreover, contrary to some scholarly approaches that see “spirituality” and “religion” as analytically distinct, I argue that feminist spirituality should be conceptualized as “lived religion”.

Methods

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a quota sample of 30 participants drawn from the survey of feminists. The survey targeted those involved in new forms of feminism that had emerged in the UK since 2000; this emphasis on new groups accounts for the high proportion (three-quarters) in their 20s and 30s. Interview participants were selected to ensure a geographical spread across England, ...