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[Seasonal Reflection] The Christmas bear: merry reflections on the sacred in a secular Christmas

Timothy Stacey reflects on secular spirits of giving in this festive period…  timothy

Standing in the urinals of a pub in Bangalore, India, I look up to see a Christmas-themed poster. A bear, wearing a Christmas hat, invites me to “get merry this Christmas – and not just on our beer”. I was about to dismiss the poster as a depressing example of the needless secularisation and commercialisation of Christmas. Though barely raised Christian, I suppose I had always assumed that Christian symbols such as, say, the nativity scene, still reminded what we might call post-Christian (raised Christian and still influenced by Christian culture despite neither believing nor attending church) celebrants that Christmas was about remembering the poor. I was about to dismiss the poster, but realising I had nothing better to do, decided to read on. In fact, the Christmas bear invited me to get merry by gifting money to a poor child. I had been too quick to judge. Later, I saw how those taking up the offer had been incorporated into a public ritual,immortalized by writing their name beside a picture of the child they had helped on a paper tag, which had been draped in the branches of a Christmas tree, where normally decorative baubles might hang.

I reflected on how a secular Christmas had nonetheless sacralized and ritualised giving and receiving, and this ritual in itself might be a strong enough anchor from which to inspire solidarity with the poor.

To understand how this might work, I began to reflect on the nature of this ritual. I recalled Bloch’s (2010) description of ritual as a performance of transcendental ideals. Notwithstanding the commercialisation, there does seem to remain, at least amongst my family and friends, an authentic sense that Christmas is about thoughtful giving and receiving amongst those we most dearly love. Bloch also tells us that ritual acts as a performance of a possible world that deliberately contradicts the world around us, such as when funerals speak to the continuation of a life despite the evidence to the contrary.

What world might our Christmas ritual of giving and receiving be contradicting? Parry (1986) observes that a capitalist society is one in which there is simultaneously no gift, since everything has a cost, and an absolute gift, whereby nothing is expected in return. Perhaps secular Christmas is a time in which we push through the no gift/absolute gift, and return to a reciprocity grounded in love.

Perhaps the Christmas bear draws its strength from this same binary, luring us towards the absolute gift. Or perhaps the bear invites us to expand the circle of those we love. In either case, in this bar, in Bangalore, the Christmas bear might be all that is required to inspire solidarity with the poor.

References

Bloch, Maurice (2010). ‘Bloch on Bloch on Religion’. Advances in Research 1. 4-13.

Parry, Jonathon (1986). ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift”. Man 21(3). 453-473.

Dr Timothy Stacey is a graduate of and Research Assistant at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London. Against a backdrop of a perceived decline of solidarity in secular modernity, especially in the North-Atlantic West, Tim’s doctoral thesis explored the sources of solidarity in religiously plural spaces. The thesis combined a genealogical exploration of constructions of solidarity in theology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and social policy, with an ethnographic study of groups seeking to develop solidarity in London. Tim is interested in research into and visions of solidarity that defy binaries such as religious/secular, embodied communitarian/cartesian individualist, and socialist/capitalist. His aim is to undertake research that strengthens solidarity by connecting with policy makers and activists.

**Please get in touch with us if you want to add similar reflections on other public holidays.

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[Research] Gender, Feminism and the Formation of British Secularism

In this post, Laura Schwartz challenges taken-for-granted binaries between religious and the secularsept_2015-june_2016_076
from historical and gender perspectives. She argues, ‘the “Woman Question” – the question of which was a better system for women – was by no means a by-product of debates between Christians and Secularists but constitutive of and absolutely fundamental to modern definitions of religion and secularism that emerged from them’.

My 2013 book, Infidel Feminism, has been largely received as an intervention into the history of feminism, pointing to a previously unexplored strand of ‘Freethinking feminism’ which existed in Britain throughout the 19th century, and arguing that anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of first wave feminist thought. I intended the book as a response to, and partly a reaction against, the ‘religious turn’ in gender and feminist history of the last 20 years or so, which (in quite rightly pointing to the importance of religion as one of the ‘founding impulses’ of modern feminism) has now so dominated the field that many of my students today assume that religion is essentially complementary to feminism, and find it difficult to articulate why it might ever have been seen as an obstacle to women’s rights in Britain.

But Infidel Feminism, was also intended as an intervention into scholarship on secularism, to say something new about the category of the secular as a whole and to take forward debates on the secularisation thesis and ‘post-secularity’. Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age (2007) has proven pivotal in this scholarship, though much of attention it has received as been critical as well as positive. Without wanting to endorse the whole of his agenda, I was particularly interested in Taylor’s critique of narratives that portray secularisation as nothing more than a “subtraction story”, as an absence of religion. Responding to this call, I attempted to approach secularism as a substantive rather than a negative category, to analyse the positive content of that particular form of secularism that emerged in 19th century Britain (and to some extent across the Anglophone world). What values did it embody? And what kind of identities did it generate? This was obviously crucial to a historical study that focused, as mine did, on the National Secular Society and wider milieu of self-proclaimed Secularists and Freethinkers, actively engaged in constructing a secular public sphere. Secularism, for them, was not merely an absence of religion, but powerful intellectual and ethical framework structuring every aspect of their lives which compelled them to think counter to the majority of Victorian society.

Where did the ideas for Infidel Feminism come from?

I began my project at the University of Oxford, where I participated in the religious history seminar which was run by many of those scholars engaged in the redefinition and expansion of the category of ‘religion’ in histories of modern Britain (most notably the authors of Garnet et al.’s Redefining Christian Britain). These scholars expanded the definitional parameters of ‘religion’ to encompass personal beliefs, linguistic structures and modes of identity. They have identified religion with a variety of phenomena beyond those traditionally associated with ecclesiastical institutions and doctrinal belief-systems, leading some historians to argue that ‘transformation’ rather than ‘decline’ ought to be the key organising factor when thinking about religion in modern society. And of course this group of scholars at Oxford were building upon and responding to Callum Brown’s highly influential concept of ‘discursive Christianity’ which defined religion not as an institution, or even a set of beliefs, but as a ‘dominant discourse’ which ‘infused public culture and was adopted by individuals, whether churchgoers or not, informing their own identities’. I was also reading, when starting out my research project, a related set of debates by historians, such as Alex Owen, who were revealing the extent to which modernity, far from being wholly secularised, has in fact continued to be permeated with ‘enchantment’, with religious and magical beliefs co-existing with and sometimes complementing scientific and rational modes of thought that were previously thought to define modernity and, in the sociologist Max Weber’s terms, signify the end of enchantment.

Rejecting secularisation as “subtraction” story

All of this scholarship was crucial in confronting the orthodox secularisation thesis, and in opening up many new and important avenues for understanding the workings of religion in 20th century Britain. But it was not terribly informative for me as someone wanting to trace not the continued influence of religion in an age of modernity, but rather the emergence of the distinctive category of the secular in this period. For better or for worse (perhaps because of the historical moment in which it emerged – the end of the 20th century with the re-emergence of religion as a powerful force on the global stage), the effect of this historical scholarship has tended to be to obscure the secular rather than to offer more meaningful understandings of it. My feeling, from attending panels on secularism at various modern British history conferences is that sometimes more zealous advocates of an expansive and discursive definition of religion, wrongly conceive of it as an all-encompassing intellectual and linguistic framework which structures the thoughts of believers and non-believers alike, causing the secular sphere to effectively disappear, an turning the ‘religious’ or the ‘sacred’ into such capacious categories that they too lose any descriptive purchase.

So that was my problem, and some of my concerns – what did I try to do differently? Firstly, I tried to take seriously the reasons that individual Freethinkers and Secularists gave for renouncing Christianity and embracing a Secular view of the world. It was tempting, in light of much of the recent scholarship on the porosity of boundaries between the religious and the secular, to read Freethinkers’ accounts of their loss of faith as simply inverted evangelical conversion narratives. (Indeed this is what Edward Royle, the pre-eminent historian of the British Secularist movement, has tended to conclude when he defines Secularism as an inversion of Victorian evangelical Christianity). Certainly, Christian metaphors and narrative structures were overtly present in the writings and autobiographies of self-proclaimed 19th century Secularists, yet to simply conclude that they were deluded in their belief that they had left the much-hated religions of their youth behind, would have been to deny the reality they themselves experienced. It was hard to stop being a Christian in 19th century Britain, one risked not only alienation from one’s family and community but also – for women especially – accusations of sexual impropriety. So to treat these historical subjects simply as inverted Christians would have been to do them an injustice. Instead, I wanted to convey a sense of the fundamental transformation they felt they had undergone, as well as the antagonism they felt towards Christianity. I therefore chose the term ‘counter-conversion’ to capture this. And I focused in the book on outlining the new ethical vision that Secularists promoted – one that was committed to complete moral and bodily autonomy, freedom of speech, abhorrence of enforced ignorance and an unflinching commitment to the democratic dissemination of knowledge.

The ‘Woman Question’ and the formation of modern concepts of religion and secularism

A crucial aspect of (to quote Charles Taylor) these ‘new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices’ was Secularists’ response to the ‘Woman Question’ – which can be briefly summarised as a rejection of God-given gender roles, and thus the sacred bonds of marriage which entailed support for the right to divorce and various (albeit fraught) articulations of greater sexual freedom for both men and women; the inclusion of women in secular societies on a more or less equal basis, an affirmation of women’s right to speak in public and act as intellectual leaders; and a rejection of certain forms of ‘imperial feminism’ whereby, unlike large portions of the women’s movement at this time, Secularists refused to valorise the treatment of women in the Christian West as superior to that in the Muslim or Hindu world.

Yet this form of Secularism was itself highly gendered, sometimes posing problems for feminism in its celebration of science and reason (masculine characterisations) versus superstition and religious enthusiasm (feminised attributes). The central argument of the book is that the ‘Woman Question’ – the question of which was a better system for women – was by no means a by-product of debates between Christians and Secularists but constitutive of and absolutely fundamental to modern definitions of religion and secularism that emerged from them.

But what of the highly apparent continuation and/or vestiges of religious language, metaphors and intellectual frameworks deployed by these self-proclaimed Secularists and Freethinkers? Ultimately, although this remains a tension in the book, I was able to accept the significance of Christianity to modern Western forms of secularism, without having to collapse one category into the other, precisely because I was no longer working within the parameters of the orthodox secularisation thesis and its assumption that, in modern society, religion would necessarily give way to a secular world. Aided by some of the scholars of religion that I discussed above, who had rejected secularism as an inevitable process, and an abstract and universal concept, I was able to examine more closely a particular form of 19th century British secularism that was historically constituted and geographically specific. Of course, then, in 19th century Britain – a society dominated by Serious Christianity at the level of the state, civil society and personal identity – the form of secularism that emerged was strongly influenced by the form of religion it reacted against, in particular evangelical Protestantism. But to argue that religion and secularism in this context existed in an antagonistic and symbiotic relationship (as I did) is not to say that they are one and the same thing, nor to deny the existence and influence of ethical, intellectual and political traditions that were overtly and distinctively Secularist in their make-up. What this points to, in terms of future areas of research, is the need to distinguish between different kinds of secularism which emerged in different places at different times, and to assess them (especially in terms of their gender and race politics) according to the particularities of their content rather than some pre-determined and assumed definition of what secularism really is.

Laura Schwartz is Associate Prof of Modern British History at the University of Warwick. She has published widely on the history of British first wave feminism. Her most recent work on the history of gender, religious and anti religious thought is an article entitled ‘”Enchanted Modernity”, Anglicanism and the Occult in Early 20th-century Oxford: Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jordain’s “Adventure” Revisited’, forthcoming in Cultural and Social History.

 

 

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[Research] “Of” or “For”: Studying “Spirituality” and the Problems therein…

How might “spirituality” relate to “nonreligion”? In this blog post Galen Watts reflects on this question galen-wattswith respect to the category of “spiritual but not religious.” Noting how a distinction between the study of spirituality and the study for spirituality is rarely made in the field of spirituality studies, he challenges scholars of spirituality to define their object more clearly and to declare their stakes in it.

There is a category that has recently begun to rise in popularity in those societies often deemed Western and which seems to fall—albeit somewhat uneasily—under the label “nonreligion.” I am speaking of those who self-identify as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). Having recently conducted research on Canadian millennials who self-identify as SBNR, it has become clear to me that SBNR spirituality, or contemporary spirituality, is a type of nonreligion that is quite distinct in form and content from, say, atheism, or even agnosticism (of course, as signifying discourses, these labels do not reflect reality, in any sense, flawlessly, but I think you get the point). We might then say the recent upsurge in the number of people in North America who self-identify as SBNR (Pew Research Center 2013) troubles any simplistic narrative one might tell about the secularization of Western states, whereby societies simply move from a “religious” standpoint to a “secular” one—“secular” understood as the decline of religious belief and practice. I am not alone in holding this view (see Fuller 2001; Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Carrette and King 2005; Gottlieb 2013; Mercadante 2014). Indeed, the rise of SBNRs has engendered an increase in the number of scholars, based in a variety of disciplines, who research “spirituality.”

In this post, I want to discuss a specific issue that continues to stifle the nascent field of what we might call “spirituality studies.” It seems to me that those of us interested in “spirituality” have not yet figured out how to adequately study this puzzling phenomenon. I believe this is in part because we have not been entirely upfront about how we approach our subject of interest, and what our underlying motivations are.

Let me explain. There are a number of scholars—usually arising out of the fields of health studies, management, or education (but not always)—who view the emergence of “spirituality” as purportedly distinct from “religion” as a positive thing, but are nevertheless reluctant to articulate how they define “spirituality” or what political commitments underpin their use of the term. For instance, Christopher Cook (2004), in offering a comprehensive overview of 265 published books and academic articles on the broad topic of “spirituality and addiction,” found what he calls “a diversity and lack of clarity of understanding of the concept of spirituality” (539). He writes: “It is therefore somewhat concerning that the authors of well over one-third of the papers studied here felt no need to attempt to define or describe the concept [of ‘spirituality’] or even to comment on the difficulty of definition” (547). This is by no means uncommon outside of the realm of “spirituality and addiction,” either. More amazing is the fact that many who remain reluctant to provide a clear explication of their use of the term nevertheless argue that “spirituality”—whatever it is—ought to be embraced and promoted, for it is universal, and therefore transcends religious and/or secular contexts.

I would argue this rests on the (implicit) view that “spirituality” is inclusive (understood positively) while “religion” is exclusive (understood negatively). Indeed, many SBNRs I spoke to seemed to endorse “spirituality” over and above “religion” on this very basis (as Joel Thiessen notes in another NSRN post, this is not uncommon). The basic assumption is something like, “religion” is exclusivistic, ideologically charged, and (in some cases) dogmatic, whereas “spirituality” is universal and inclusivistic in nature. Of course, this assumption is problematic because it is, in fact, self-contradictory. For no discourse is truly universal, most especially those discourses which claim a universal scope; in the end, a discourse that is founded on the principle of inclusivity is at least exclusive of those which are founded on the principle of exclusivity. Thus it is somewhat curious how those who herald discourses on “spirituality” in many instances are reluctant to embrace those discourses which they deem “religious.” Nevertheless, this dichotomization helps to explain why and how even a New Atheist like Sam Harris can embrace a “secular spirituality.”

Of course, there are those who propose such a vague definition of “spirituality” that it becomes truly universally applicable. Ursula King (2011) has done this in offering her open-ended definition of “spiritualities”: “[they] quite simply connote those ideas, practices and commitments that nurture, sustain and shape the fabric of human lives, whether as individual persons or communities” (21 emphasis in the original). This definition is useful in that it provides a framework with which to begin discussions about different kinds of spirituality. However, it should be noted, it offers no substantive description of any specific spiritualities. Under it, one could just as easily call Christianity, American Football or Nazism types of spirituality. And although I see nothing intrinsically wrong with these applications, such examples should lead us to recognize why we ought to be more forthright and articulate about the kinds of spirituality we wish to endorse, and the substantive moral and political commitments that underpin them.

Disciplinary boundaries clearly play a formative role here. Scholars that work in health studies, management, or education tend not to study “spirituality” in order to better understand what it is or what it signifies, but rather to find out what a specific kind of spirituality – that they usually normatively endorse (or disparage) – might do for their workplace. In other words, these scholars are motivated by a personal interest in contemporary spirituality and the positive benefits (or negative consequences) they believe it yields in practical application. This approach, I believe, is better understood as the study for spirituality. In contrast, religious studies, cultural studies, or critical theory scholars generally take a broader (perhaps less practical) approach to “spirituality,” framing it as a socio-cultural and/or discursive construct that is everywhere and always political. These scholars therefore may seek to offer a description of contemporary spirituality as it presents itself in a specific social or cultural context, and/or critique it from a normative standpoint. This approach rightly falls under the study of spirituality.

Nevertheless, this is not to suggest these two approaches cannot, or do not, overlap. One may hold a normative understanding of contemporary spirituality, while at the same time, seek to better understand it as an abstract concept or as a lived phenomenon, or, wish to criticize that which one views as an inauthentic or perhaps corrupt form of it. And conversely, one may seek to better understand how spirituality operates within certain spheres (e.g. healthcare, education, etc.) from a critical perspective, all the while hoping to promote its application in said spheres. Thus I do not wish to give the impression that these approaches are inherently at odds. What remains true, however, is that they are, in important ways, distinct endeavours; and the confusion surrounding the study of spirituality, I argue, originates in their not being recognized as such.

Bibliography

Carrette, Jeremy R., and Richard King. 2005. $elling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London: Routledge.

Cook, Christopher C. H. 2004. “Addiction and Spirituality.” Society for the Study of Addiction. (99) 539-551.

Fuller, Robert C. 2001. Spiritual But Not Religious. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Gottlieb, Roger S. 2013. Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Heelas, Paul, and Linda Woodhead. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

King, Ursula. 2011. “Can Spirituality Transform Our World?” Journal for the Study of Spirituality. (1) 17-34.

Mercadante, Linda A. 2014. Belief Without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual But Not Religious. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Pew Research Center. “Canada’s Changing Religious Landscape.” 2013. Pew Religion Public Life Project. Accessed June 26, 2016. http://www.pewforum.org/2013/06/27/canadas-changing-religious-landscape/.

Galen Watts is a PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Program at Queen’s University. He has a broad and diverse range of academic interests. Currently, his research could be classified as convening at the intersection of political philosophy, religious studies, and social theory. For his Masters, he sought to articulate and analyze how Canadian millennials (ages 18-34) who self-identify as “spiritual but not religious” conceptualize the relationship between their “individual” spirituality and their commitments, or lack thereof, to a number of social justice issues. For his PhD, he is continuing to research the basic values, belief-systems, and practices that inform contemporary spirituality among millennials in Canada in order to discern its ideological nature, as well as its social and political implications, broadly understood.

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[Research] The Mind’s Revolt: The Lessons of Protestant Freethought for the Study of New Atheism

In this article, Liam Jerrold Fraser explains how an examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English freethought can help us to understand contemporary New Atheism. By using a historical case study, Fraser hopes to push back against viewing atheism as either a purely political or purely intellectual phenomenon and instead suggests that only a multi-disciplinary study can fully make sense of atheism.liam-fraser

It is a common belief in many Western societies that politics and religion should be separate, and that religion should play little or no role in the governance of modern states. This belief, in turn, can support two other assumptions: first, that it is possible to have religious beliefs whose significance is purely intellectual, and which possess no political meaning; and second, that the absence or rejection of religious language, symbols, and narratives in political life implies neutrality or indifference toward the intellectual cogency of religious belief. These beliefs can affect the methodologies we use, as is seen in different approaches toward New Atheism. On the one hand are a range of polemical works that seek to defend or refute the intellectual plausibility of its core arguments, with little consideration of its social and political significance. On the other hand are works by Schulzke, Kettell, and McAnulla, which have sought to move beyond this intellectual and polemical approach by conceptualising New Atheism as a primarily political movement (Schulzke, 2013; Kettell, 2013; McAnulla, 2014; LeDrew, 2016).

In contrast to these overly intellectual or political methods, historians of Protestant freethought such as Budd, Reventlow, and Champion have long noted the inter-dependent relationship between atheism, theology, and political protest (Budd, 1977; Reventlow, 1984; Champion, 1992). Although largely forgotten today, the Protestant freethinkers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries question many popular assumptions about the boundaries between politics and religion, as they fought political and social battles with theology, and challenged Christianity not with ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘science’ but with Protestant Christianity’s own teachings. My own research on Protestant freethought suggests that this period – perhaps unexpectedly – holds three definitional and methodological principles that are potentially useful for the study of present-day New Atheism: one, that atheism is a social and political phenomenon whose expression is frequently intellectual; two, that its intellectual expression involves the use of theological categories; and three, for these reasons, atheism must be studied in its social, political, and theological aspects.

The political and social background to the first flowering of anti-Christian thought in Britain is the chaos of the English Civil War (1642-1651) and its aftermath. The Civil War had witnessed an explosion in religious heterodoxy, as a multiplicity of sects, reading the Bible for themselves, rejected traditional doctrine and conventional morality, and adopted beliefs and practices considered immoral and even treasonous. In order to curtail this hermeneutical, moral, and political pluralism, and defend against the persistent threat of Roman Catholicism, figures such as John Locke altered English Protestant thought in two ways. First, against Protestant enthusiasts who claimed to possess private revelation, Locke set reason as the judge of revelation, rather than presupposing revelation as the basis of all theological thought. This meant that revelation was to be assessed and investigated just like anything else. Second, against Roman Catholicism, Locke divorced the reading of Scripture from its interpretive context within confessions, creeds, and the liturgy of the Church, and argued that there was an objective meaning to Scriptural texts that could be discerned by any person, irrespective of the theological tradition in which they were raised (Locke 1695; 1999; 2012). These theological changes were accompanied by a second consequence of the Civil War – the Great Ejection. This saw hundreds of nonconformist clergy and their congregations ejected from the Church of England, and a series of laws known as the Clarendon Code enacted, which severely limited the civil and political rights of non-Anglicans.

It was the combination of these two theological and political factors that would lead to the first flowering of anti-Christian freethought in England. In order to illustrate this, I will briefly survey two representative figures from this period.

The first is John Toland (1670-1722). Toland adopted Locke’s epistemology almost wholesale, but differed from him in his willingness to use reason not simply to verify that Scripture is revelation, but to question whether Scripture is revelation at all. To believe something contrary to reason simply because it is found in Scripture, argues Toland, is to give license to every absurdity. Moreover, to claim that any doctrine is above reason, and hence ‘mysterious’, is to play into the hands of priests, who use mysteries to cement their own religious power. In arguing this, Toland explicitly places himself within the line of the Protestant Reformers, arguing that he can no more be blamed for encouraging religious doubt than Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli can be, for they too opposed the prevailing religious authorities of their day (Toland, 1696; 1997).

The second of our representative figures is Anthony Collins (1676-1729). Like Toland, Collins also adopted Locke’s epistemology, yet took its implications much further. The continuing possibility of a reversal of legal toleration for nonconformists led Collins to marshal older puritan arguments against the “Popish trappings” of the Church of England to push for a new rationalist agenda against Church authority. The Twentieth Article of the Thirty-Nine Articles gave the Church of England the authority ‘to decree rites or ceremonies and authority in controversies of faith’. Collins argues that, if authority is the basis of the Church’s power, then there should have been no Reformation, for the Roman Catholic Church also claims such authority for itself (Collins, 1710; 1770). In addition to this direct attack upon Church authority came an indirect one based on the new biblical hermeneutics. A literal reading of biblical prophecies such as Isaiah 7:14 shows that Christ cannot be the prophet’s intended object. Yet if the prophecy fails to be fulfilled in Christ then Jesus, his apostles, and the Church of England are shown to be wrong, and their religious authority crumbles (Collins, 1737).

English freethought, then, drew its intellectual structure from ambiguities within prevailing forms of Protestant theology, and its social and political motivation from the persecution of nonconformists. Due to the theological and political factors in play, the arguments of Toland and Collins – and many other freethinkers – display a range of ambiguous features. First, they employ Protestant arguments to advance an anti-Christian, rationalist worldview. Second, while they are couched as theology, their object is clearly the political one of undermining the authority of the Church of England and the Establishment it supported.

The ambiguity of this period means that no single methodology, whether historical, political, or theological, is sufficient to account for it, and this necessitates the adoption of alternative methodological principles. First, this period suggests that anti-Christian thought is a social and political phenomenon which commonly manifests itself in the intellectual critique of religion; two, that its intellectual expression involves the use of theology; and three, for these reasons, atheism must be studied in its social, political, and theological aspects.

While derived from the study of eighteenth-century freethought, I believe these principles are also useful for the study of present-day New Atheism, offering helpful corrections to the work of a number of commentators. The first principle corrects polemical works of all stripes that treat New Atheism as a primarily intellectual issue, as well as works by the likes of Schulzke, Kettell, McAnulla, and LeDrew that treat it as a primarily political phenomenon. The second principle corrects writers such as Julian Baggini, Sam Harris, and AC Grayling, who argue that there is no dependence of atheism upon the religion it rejects [Baggini, 2003; Harris, 2007; Grayling, 2013]. On the contrary, there is no motivation, structure, vocabulary, or audience for atheism unless it has a positive religious content to critique, negate, and invert. The third and final principle offers assurance to those who are wary of engaging in theology, which, rather unfortunately, has the reputation of being something of a non-subject. On the contrary, the history of Protestant freethought suggests that there is no way to properly understand anti-Christian movements such as New Atheism without considering the theology that generates and structures them.

The strength of these principles arises from their acceptance of existing disciplinary boundaries, yet also from their ability to integrate different methodologies into a multi-disciplinary approach that captures the complex intellectual and political nature of anti-Christian movements. And for a phenomenon as contentious and complex as New Atheism, that is no bad thing.

References

Baggini, J., 2003. Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Budd, S., 1977. Varieties of Unbelief. London: Heinemann.

Champion, J.A.I, 1992. The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, A., 1737. Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. London.

Collins, A., 1770. Priestcraft in Perfection. London: B. Bragg.

Grayling, A.C., 2013. The God Argument. London: Bloomsbury.

Harris, S., 2007. Letter to a Christian Nation. London: Bantam Press.

Kettell, S., 2013. ‘Faithless: The Politics of New Atheism’. Secularism and Nonreligion, 2, pp.61–72.

LeDrew, S., 2016. The Evolution of Atheism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Locke, J., 1695, 1999. The Reasonableness of Christianity, by John Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Locke, J., 1695, 2012. Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

McAnulla, M. 2014. ‘Secular Fundamentalists? Characterising the New Atheist Approach to Secularism, Religion and Politics’. British Politics, 9, pp. 124–145.

Reventlow, H.G., 1984. The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World. London: SCM Press.

Schulzke, M., 2013. ‘The Politics of New Atheism’. Politics and Religion, 6(4), pp. 778-799.

Toland, J., 1696, 1997. Christianity not Mysterious. Dublin; Lilliput Press.

Liam Jerrold Fraser recently completed a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, where he examined the Protestant origins of British and American atheism, and the way in which this Protestant heritage informs the theological assumptions of contemporary New Atheists. He serves on the ministry team at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh.

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[CFP] Atheism, Agnosticism, and Non-Religious Worldviews: Theoretical Models and Psychological Measurement

The central focus of this special issue of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, with guest editors Ralph W. Hood Jr., Heinz Streib, and Thomas J. Coleman III, is to challenge psychologists and cognitive scientists to move beyond atheism and agnosticism by investigating “non-religious worldviews” as full-fledged constructs rather than as a solely negative identity.

We invite manuscripts (theoretical, empirical, and method) focused on exploring atheism, agnosticism, and non-religion from multiple perspectives by addressing the question of complexity and multidimensionality in measurement, psychological mechanisms, and theoretical models.

Topics of specific interest are

  • Psychometric measures of non-religious worldviews
  • Atheist and agnostic “spirituality.” Can nonbelievers be “spiritual?”
  • Computer models of atheism
  • Comparative studies of atheists and theists
  • Quantifying and categorizing types of nonbelief
  • Atheism and analytical thinking
  • Moving beyond stigma and discrimination
  • Non-religion in childhood and adolescence
  • A framework for “implicit atheism?”
  • Do agnostics differ psychologically from atheists?
  • Atheism, agnosticism, and non-religious prosociality
  • Atheism, a next step in human evolution?
  • Nonbelief as a complex, adaptive system?
  • Atheism, health, and well-being
  • Atheism and the autism spectrum

Deadlines

  • March 31, 2017: letter of intent submission
  • September 15, 2017: submission of selected articles

More information: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/rel/call-for-papers-atheism.aspx

 

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[Event] NSRN Annual Lecture 2016

NSRN Annual Lecture 2016: Is atheism a religion?

Psychological & Anthropological Perspectives.

 

This panel will consider atheism and religion from the perspectives of psychology and anthropology and will seek to bring scientific theory and evidence to bear on these questions and establish how it might (and might not) make sense to liken atheism to a religion.

Speakers include:

Dr Miguel Farias, Coventry University

Professor Christopher French, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Dr Jonathan Lanman, Queen’s University Belfast

Dr Lois Lee, UCL (chair)

 

The event will take place at UCL – 6pm, 2 December 2016.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nsrn-annual-lecture-is-atheism-a-religion-registration-28392936036

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[Research] Thank God for Secularity

In an attempt to investigate further the contemporary relationship between secularity and religiousroger-mitchell communities, Roger Mitchell offers us his thoughts on how the establishment of a fully secular society and a strong institutional separation between secular authorities and religious communities can lead to positive consequences for religious and nonreligious people alike.

My argument is that the progress of secularity as the new normal in British society is crucial to the recovery of a church that recognisably represents the Jesus of the New Testament gospel story. I make this argument by reflecting on the sermon that Giorgio Agamben gave in Notre Dame Cathedral in March 2009 (Agamben, 2012). The argument has three main components: 1) the church is understood to be a community of foreigners and exiles as opposed to citizens of a city, state, kingdom or empire; 2) the church is marked by a distinctive relation to time which is in tension with the chronological timeframe of a particular socio-political construct of law or state, in our case Western neo-liberal representative democracy; 3) the way that community can form and flourish is in an extraordinary kind of tension between the poles presented in the first two points, namely aliens and citizens and chronological and eschatological time. Taking these components in order, I will look at several characteristics from the genealogy of Western European Secularity that can help provide for this ecclesial recovery. I will then suggest that there can be a positive tension between secularity and a Jesus style of church, and that this can engender a flourishing community for all. I will then refer to the current refugee crisis as a context for this.

 

1. Secularity as space for positive alienation

 

William Cavanaugh points out that the word “religion” itself only came into use with the Renaissance (Cavanaugh, 2009:70). The only differentiation prior to that was of regnum and sacerdotium, that is to say the realm of the monarch’s power and the realm of the priests’ power, and the saeculum was simply the time that remained between the first coming and the expected second coming of Christ; it was by no means to be thought of as secular. In this context, the church was no longer the counterpolitical agent of community but the oppressive partner in the colonisation of the whole of socio-cultural and political space. My own work traces the genealogy of this occupation from the 4th century partnership of church and empire, which I suggest is best understood as a fall, or lapsis, in the history of the church (Mitchell, 2011). This idea of a lapsis is something that John Milbank and Michael Alan Gillespie,  among others, suggested happened at the Enlightenment (Milbank, 1997: 44; Gillespie, 2008: 11-12).  But, as well as locating this fall much earlier, I see it playing out right up until the present biopolitical fulness of neoliberal capitalism. In this context, the recognition of religion as a specific entity provides for the possibility of its eventual separation from the socio-political mainstream and the subsequent recognition of secularity as a norm, which in turn gives space for the re-positioning of the church as exiles and foreigners.

 

2. Secularity as the opportunity for interruption and surprise

 

The increasing displacement of the church, from a central role in the saeculum as a permanent partner in sovereignty, and the consequent establishment of a secular sphere of Law and State provides for the recognition of a de-sacralised secular realm. Now a reconfigured church can again have the opportunity to interrupt the existing constructed temporal order and be restored to its early identity of constantly surprising the ongoing hegemony of the socio-political system. The church can become what Paul Fletcher has described as impolitical (Fletcher, 2009: 176-178), because it does not and cannot fit the mainstream timeframe.

As is becoming increasingly clear, it is not all transcendence and spirituality that is banished from this secular realm, but the organised religion that was perceived to dominate it, or might have the potential to do so. This explains the increasingly post-material character of secularity as Graham Ward exposes (Ward, 2009: 115-117), and shows that secularity continues to carry both power from above and power from below, analogous to the two streams Linda Woodhead recognises within Christendom (Woodhead, 2004: 406) The stream from above continues to maintain the status quo, while the one from below has the potential to provide co-conspirators alongside any newly representative form of church.

 

3. Intensive engagement and the loving community

 

Key to all this is Agamben’s understanding of the tension between the expressions of corporate identity, which he defines as citizens and aliens, and his two distinct configurations of time. Here he introduces two Greek expressions selected by the Apostle Paul, hōs mē and katargēsis, to interpret what is happening. It is important not to be put off by Agamben’s vocabulary here, because it provides important insight into how the contemporary ecclesia may be understood as a net contributor to the overall wellbeing of society. The first word literally means “as not” and conveys the way that doing a particular job or having a particular role in the ongoing order can be used to subvert it to another end or purpose, in this context, that of loving community. The second word, katargēsis is used by Agamben to convey the idea of disregarding the role of “law” and of the “state” while affirming any motivation behind them that might promote a flourishing community.

For the radical church operating within the counter timeframe of Jesus’ rule, or what Agamben calls messianic time, this component is love (Agamben, 2005: 108). Some of us radical contemporary disciples have been attempting to configure this politics of love by means of the newly invented word kenarchy, from archy: a way of ordering or relating in social space and keno: the Greek word for empty, together signifying emptying out sovereign power and replacing it with love (Mitchell and Arram, 2014). A contemporary example of this love component at work would be the use of every available opportunity to show hospitality to strangers and to bend the powers of state and law to this end. It hardly needs saying that the current refugee crisis is calling for just this kind of innovatory expression of British and European community. By such means, out of the encounter between secularity and the newly disclosed church, the community of love is beginning to emerge.

 

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. The Church and the Kingdom. Translated by Leland de la Durantaye. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012.

———————–. The Time That Remains. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Cavanaugh, William. The Myth of Religious Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Fletcher, Paul. Discipling the Divine. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington Vermont: Ashgate, 2009.

Gillespie, Michael Alan. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Milbank, John. The Word Made Strange. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1997.

Mitchell, Roger Haydon. Church, Gospel and Empire: How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2011.

Mitchell, Roger Haydon and Julie Tomlin Arram eds. Discovering Kenarchy. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2014.

Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God. Downers Grove Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015.

Ward, Graham. The Politics of Discipleship. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009.

Woodhead, Linda. An Introduction to Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Roger is a political theologian with a particular interest in the politics of love. He co-directs 2MT, a charitable organisation committed to managing change, is External Partnerships Coordinator of the Richardson Institute for Peace Studies and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Lancaster University Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion. He is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology, the Conflict Research Society and the United Kingdom Pentecostal-Charismatic Leaders Conference.  He is married with two sons and four grandchildren.

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[Research] Contemporary Japan’s “Nonreligious” Conversion to Christianity

In this post, Jesse LeFebvre unpacks the enigma of Japanese nonreligiosity by analysing thejesse presence and increase of Christian weddings in Japan. He argues that Japanese nonreligiousness has altered strategies of Japanese Christian missions and influenced the bridal industry.

Statistically speaking, the vast majority of contemporary Japanese self-identify as nonreligious (Reader 2012). However, this self-identification is far from a wholesale rejection of religion, and often employed both to reject and affirm religious behaviors and identities (LeFebvre, 2015). Most typically, nonreligious attitudes reject religious dispositions that are perceived as deviant, unhealthy, or foreign while simultaneously affirming religion’s importance. Nonreligious individuals tend to rely on religious professionals and vicariously entrust specialized acts of prayer and ritual to religious authorities when desirable and appropriate. Along with various Buddhist and Shinto rites, Christian wedding ceremonies are now one of the occasions where nonreligious Japanese rely on religious professionals. Nonreligious attitudes are responsible for significant transformations in Japanese Christianity and the bridal industry and the successful response of the Christian churches and the bridal industry to consumer demand has led to an explosion in Christian wedding ceremonies. In short, the popularity of Christian weddings among nonreligious individuals has transformed the policies and approaches of Christian churches and created new Christian ritual venues and religious organizations.

The story of contemporary Japanese Christianity is one of success and failure in the face of overwhelming “nonreligiousness.” The story of failure depicts the inability of Christian churches to acquire Japanese converts (Mullins 1998); both transplant and domestic Japanese churches face aging membership and dwindling baptism numbers. In 2006, Christians accounted for 1.2 percent of the Japanese population (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2006, 31). Similarly, Christian religious organizations accounted for a mere 2.3 percent of Japan’s 182,468 religious juridical persons (Ishii 2007, 59). This data, along with an aging church population, led researchers to suggest that a marginal Christian population is headed for rapid decline (Saito 2005).

However, these statistics on Christian affiliation do not account for the unprecedented popularity of Christian wedding ceremonies or address how nonreligiousness has altered Japanese Christianity. By the mid-1990s, Christian weddings surpassed Shinto weddings and, since 1999, continue to be the wedding ceremony of choice among sixty to seventy percent of Tokyo couples with similar trends in popularity throughout the country (Ishii 2005, 31). Christian wedding ceremonies have attracted and sustained the interest of a majority of Japanese—the majority of whom are nonreligious. In short, the majority of Japanese are not only “Born Shinto, Die Buddhist,” (Reader 1991), but they also “Identify nonreligious, Wed Christian.”

Nonreligiousness has transformed the traditional Japanese Christian churches and the bridal industry. Although frequently dismissed as bridal-industry activity, Christian churches and personnel were essential in the rise of Christian weddings and their popularity. On the 1st of March, 1975, the Vatican granted the Japanese Catholic Church special permission to conduct wedding ceremonies for non-affiliated, non-Christian couples (Japanese Catholic Pastoral and Evangelization Committee 1992. 1). Nonreligious Japanese have access to this Catholic sacrament in a manner on par with baptized church members. These forms of access were instrumental in popularizing the Christian wedding in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The Catholic Church used in Kanda Masaki and Matsuda Seiko’s “wedding ceremony of sacred shining (seiki no kekkon)” became the setting of the 1991 Japanese television series Itsu ka, sarejio kyōkai de and one of the most popular venues in the early years of Christian weddings.

In addition to new policies and approaches, the nonreligious demand for Christian weddings has given rise to new religious institutions and powerful partnerships between commercial and religious groups—occasionally blurring the lines between the two. One successful example of religious and commercial partnership is the Christian Bridal Mission (kirisutokyō buraidaru senkyōdan), which was founded in 1980 and incorporated as a religious juridical person in 1986 (Ishii 2005, 49-50). From humble beginnings, this non-denominational Evangelical Protestant Church—the first Christian organization devoted exclusively to the production of weddings—grew to national proportions. Currently, the Christian Bridal Mission has over one thousand ministers—making it one of the largest Christian organizations in Japan.

Where the active majority of people are nonreligious, mechanisms for establishing a convincing reference to Christianity takes on a sensual character. Visual cues—minister’s race, architectural style, musical talent, etc.—have become the primary way not only to generate a connection to Christian tradition but to verify that a connection does exist (LeFebvre 2015). The bridal industry relies on sensory experience in almost every conceivable manner with the result that venues of commercial institutions now play a crucial role in the success and continued popularity of Christian weddings as new Protestant churches.

Mentioning Notre Dame and Christian relics undoubtedly conjures images of Notre Dame de Paris, which houses some of Catholicism’s most famous relics—the Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, and one of the Holy Nails. One is less likely to imagine the Notre Dame Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, which houses and displays relics of Saint Valentine (Igarashi 2007, 120). The Notre Dame Shimonoseki claims to be one of Japan’s largest great cathedrals, but there are no parishioners or church members who regularly attend services—at least not in the ordinary sense. Despite the rich Christian environment, Notre Dame Shimonoseki is not a “church” in the legal sense. It is a commercial entity devoted to meeting consumer demand for wedding ceremonies; a space—borrowing the Japanese architect Igarashi Tarō’s (2007) terminology—referred to as a “wedding church (kekkonshiki kyōkai).”

According to a 2003-2004 survey conducted by Kekkon Pia, when asked what aspect of the wedding they felt was most important, the most common response of couples was venue (kaijō) followed by ceremonial style (kyoshiki no sutairu), indicating the importance of sensory experience (Igarashi 2007, 27). Industry response to this demand manifested itself in a number of ways—the most visible including the creation of more than 1,228 locations for the performance of Christian weddings (Igarashi 2007, 49). Nearly half of these locations are freestanding wedding churches designed to meet expectations for aesthetic beauty and religious authenticity.

The vast majority of wedding churches are built in one of two Western architectural styles—Classical or Gothic. Stained glass, pulpits and pipe organs are common fixtures in both wedding churches and hotel chapels (Igarashi 2007, 53). Wedding churches are typically designed to boast a large-scale vaulted-arch ceiling, extended virgin road, steeples, a rose window, and flying buttress. Some wedding churches are actually built from the ground up using traditional materials and, even in some cases, materials taken from Gothic churches that were torn down in Europe, imported and reconstructed in Japan (Igarashi 2007, 52). The bridal industry is building Gothic-style churches at scales and in numbers that Catholic and Protestant Churches in Japan could never afford or justify. Japanese demand for Christian ritual spaces is fueling a boom in this architectural style that cannot be witnessed anywhere else in the world.

In Japan, nonreligiousness is considered normal, non-exclusive religious belief and helps to explain the wealth of diversity in the Japanese religious market and recent acceptance of Christian weddings (LeFebvre 2015). Under this paradigm and beginning with Shinto weddings, wedding ceremonies in modern Japan have become more, not less, religious in the postwar era. More recently, nonreligious attitudes are responsible for significant transformations in Japanese Christian churches and the bridal industry. Currently, Protestant and Catholic Churches offer services to meet the demand of the nonreligious in unprecedented ways. But this “commercialization” of Christianity and growth of new Christian organizations can only be properly understood in tandem with the “religionization” of the bridal industry—which now coordinates thousands of wedding churches and cooperates with thousands of ministers. In predominantly nonreligious Japan, religion not only retains its value—its scarcity ensures that the demand will continue to create lucrative opportunities for those who meet the needs of the nonreligious.

References

Agency for Cultural Affairs. (2006). Shūkyō nenkan. Tokyo, Japan: Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Igarashi, Tarō. (2007). Kekkonshiki kyōkai no tanjō. Tokyo: Shunjusha.

Ishii, Kenji. (2005). Kekkonshiki: Shiawase wo tsukuru gishiki. Tokyo: Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai.

Ishii, Kenji. (2007). Gendai nihonjin no shukyō. Tokyo: Shin’yosha.

Japanese Catholic Pastoral and Evangelization Committee. (1992). Nihon no katorikku kyōkai ni okeru hikirisutosha dōshi no kekkon ni tsuite. Tokyo, Japan: Catholic Bishop’s Conference.

LeFebvre, Jesse. (2015). “Christian wedding ceremonies: ‘Nonreligiousness’ in contemporary Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 42(2), 185-203.

Mullins, Mark. (1998). Christianity Made In Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Reader, Ian. (1991). Religion in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Reader, Ian (2012). “Secularisation, R.I.P.? Nonsense! The ‘Rush Hour Away from the Gods’ and the Decline of Religion in Contemporary Japan.” Journal of Religion in Japan, 1(2012) 7-36.

Saitō, Zenkyū. (2005). “Jūnengo Nihon no kirisutokyō wa sonzai shiuru ka.” Hanashiai (November).

Jesse Robert LeFebvre is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research interests focus on contemporary and medieval manifestations of religion in Japan.

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[Research] Atheism on YouTube for the last ten years

Looking at the spread and negotiation of a particular controversy between atheists andstaff-photo-1 Christians, Stephen Pihlaja examines how YouTube users negotiate tensions in a particular social space and how the collapse of a recognisable context for these negotiations affect the ways in which they put forth their beliefs. Pihlaja shows how close analysis of interaction on social media can provide insights about the religious arguments and discussions develop over time.

For the last ten years, my research (Pihlaja, 2013; 2014a; 2014b; 2011) has followed atheists and Christians on social media and YouTube. As a social media site, YouTube particularly has played an important role in the visibility of atheism, providing a platform for atheists to challenge religious dogma. This has been particularly true for the American context, where many of the YouTube atheists I have research are located. In America, atheism is still viewed with suspicion, and consistently one of the most distrusted minorities. Particularly in places like the deep southern states, identifying as an atheist remains problematic. YouTube, however, has facilitated ‘coming out’ as an atheist, a topic that has been of interest to researchers in the sociology of religion (Cimino and Smith, 2011, Smith and Cimino, 2012). The interaction of the dominant culture offline, and the emerging, bullish atheist culture on YouTube has created a kind of tension, where Christians would essentially come onto the site to ‘preach the gospel’.

Initially, my assumption about talk around religion on YouTube would focus on issues of theology and religious dogma. Unexpectedly, however, fewer of the disagreements were about the proof of God’s existence, and more were about who had insulted whom. The boundaries between religious and non-religious, as Hutchings suggests in his recent blog post, are not always simple to delineate, particularly when looking at real discourse. My book, Antagonism on YouTube, (Pihlaja, 2014a) looks at how these arguments, that seemed markedly small and petty in comparison to points of doctrine and theology, developed in one particular community of users. Adapting a discourse-centred online ethnographic approach (Androutsopoulos, 2008), I analysed the development of one particular argument, an instance where one Christian user called an atheist ‘human garbage’, after the atheist had insulted the Christian user’s wife.

The argument spread when the Christian user defended calling the atheist ‘human garbage’, using a Bible passage from the gospel of John. This action resulted in several kinds of responses: first, users (both Christians and atheists) who rejected the premise entirely, saying that it was never okay to call someone ‘human garbage’, regardless of the circumstances. Second, there were users who accepted this reading of the Bible (namely Christians) and said that although it was harsh, it was better to warn people about the truth than for them to end up being judged in hell. A third response, however, was the most interesting. These users argued not that it was wrong to call others ‘human garbage’, but that the Bible passage being used to condone it was being misread. The arguments focused on the use of metaphor and how users interpreted the parables of Jesus (Pihlaja, 2013).

While the Christians in my study argued over whether or not the Bible condoned calling other people ‘human garbage’, the atheists ridiculed the arguments and made the case that even the possibility that the language could be justified using the Bible showed how corrupting religion could be. However, like the arguments among the Christians about the reading of the Bible, an argument arose among the atheists about the extent to which the example of ‘human garbage’ could be used to condemn Christianity more generally, or if indeed, this was just an example of one person misreading the Bible. The atheists then argued back and forth about whether there were ‘good Christians’ and ‘bad Christians’ (Pihlaja, 2014b). These arguments as well were instructive in showing how discussions about religion and ideology can fall into very small, interpersonal discussions.

My research has shown that religious discussions and arguments cannot be divorced from the social context in which they take place. This has grown increasingly more complicated with the development of new mobile technology and the integration of offline and online lives. My research now (Pihlaja, forthcoming, 2017) looks at the ways in which ‘context collapse’ (or the diverse audiences watching users on social media from a variety of different, disparate backgrounds) has affected how users present themselves and their beliefs or lack of beliefs online. In 2006, many users couldn’t say they were atheists in offline settings, but could do so on YouTube; now, it’s potentially much easier to declare a lack of faith, but users have a growing awareness of all the different people watching them. There is an increased awareness of the multitude of online and offline audiences and the effect of this integration on how people of faith and no faith interact with one another is an important area of research going forward.

References

ANDROUTSOPOULOS, J. 2008. Potentials and Limitations of Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography. Language@Internet [Online], 5. Available: http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1610 [Accessed June 6, 2016].

CIMINO, R. & SMITH, C. 2011. The New Atheism and the Formation of the Imagined Secularist Community. Journal of Media and Religion, 10, 24-38.

PIHLAJA, S. 2011. Cops, popes, kings, and garbage collectors: Metaphor and antagonism in an atheist/Christian YouTube video thread. Language@Internet [Online], 8. Available: http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2011/Pihlaja/ [Accessed 6 June 2013].

PIHLAJA, S. 2013. ‘It’s all red ink’: The interpretation of biblical metaphor among Evangelical Christian YouTube users. Language and Literature, 22, 103-117.

PIHLAJA, S. 2014a. Antagonism on YouTube: Metaphor in Online Discourse, London, Bloomsbury.

PIHLAJA, S. 2014b. ‘Christians’ and ‘bad Christians’: Categorization in atheist user talk on YouTube. Text & Talk, 34, 623-639.

PIHLAJA, S. forthcoming, 2017. Religious talk online: the online evangelical language of Muslims, Christians, and atheists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

SMITH, C. & CIMINO, R. 2012. Atheisms unbound: The role of the new media in the formation of a secularist identity. Secularism and Nonreligion, 1, 17-31.

Stephen is an applied linguist, discourse analyst, and stylistician researching and teaching at Newman University in Birmingham UK. His research focuses on the discourse dynamics of talk on the Internet, particularly in online video around religious issues. His book Antagonism on YouTube: Metaphor in Online Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2014) focuses on the ways in which Christians and atheists argue online. He is currently completing a second monograph entitled Religious Talk Online: Muslim, Christian, and Atheist Discourse on Social Media, forthcoming on Cambridge University Press.

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[Event Report] Secularization, Social Movements, and Sea Turtles: Reflections on the 2016 Association for the Sociology of Religion Conference

In this event report Jacqui Frost and Amanda Schutz cover the Association for the Sociology of amanda-picjackie-picReligion’s 2016 annual meeting. They detail the launch of new research projects into Understanding Unbelief as well as offering reflections from Woodhead’s lecture ‘Is No Religion the New Religion.’ Also, they share insights from a convened joint session on what social movement theories can tell us about nonreligion.

This year’s Association for the Sociology of Religion’s annual meeting was taken place on 19th – 21st August in Seattle. The theme was Exploring Diversity: Varieties of Religion and Nonreligion. As a result, there were numerous panels and presentations on the importance of increased sociological investigation into nonreligious experience and community. While there were too many great panels to recount here, including Author Meets Critics sessions for Lois Lee’s Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular and Christel Manning’s Losing Our Religion: How Unaffiliated Parents Are Raising Their Children, the overall takeaway from the conference was that nonreligious experience is increasingly influential and sociologists will have no choice but to engage with it going forward.

Kicking things off early Saturday morning was Lois Lee’s convened panel titled “Who Cares About Unbelief? Social, Political, and Legal Questions for the Scientific Study of Nonreligious Belief.” This panel came directly out of Lee’s new research initiative (with Stephen Bullivant, Miguel Farias, and Jonathan Lanman), the Understanding Unbelief Programme, which is offering research grants, early career awards, and public engagement funds to further scientific understanding of atheism and other forms of unbelief around the world. The panel was asked a set of questions regarding who, apart from social scientists and unbelievers themselves, might be interested in unbelief and why; in what ways the growth of unbelief will affect local communities, journalists, and public institutions; and how this growth will curb or create new social tensions. Overall, the panelists asked more questions than they answered, but the questions generated are likely to be a primary focus for many nonreligious scholars in the near future. Jessica Martinez from Pew Research Center tackled these questions from a political engagement angle, asking how changes in the religious landscape might result in changes to the political landscape. She discussed how the unaffiliated are now the largest “religious” group in the Democratic Party, but that the unaffiliated have historically been less likely to show up at the polls on Election Day. She raised questions about how the rise in atheists and agnostics among Americans will influence the 2016 election (if at all), and if the unaffiliated will become more politically engaged than they have been previously. Sociologist Rhys Williams focused on social movements and immigration, asking how unbelief might mobilize activism and foster commitment in social movements. He also asked whether nonreligious organizations and communities will be able to cultivate resources and cultural reproduction for immigrants—something that religious organizations have been so good at for centuries. Journalist David Briggs implored nonreligious scholars to help journalists get the story right by providing them with responsible summaries and statistics, and religious studies scholar Joseph Blankholm focused on organized non-belief. Finally, education scholar Alyssa Rockenbach asked how higher education influences nonreligious beliefs and behaviors. While there has been a lot of research about the “secularizing effect” (or lack thereof) that higher education has on religious students, Rockenbach pointed to the need for similar studies on the nonreligious students.

On Saturday night, the presidential address was read by Mary Jo Neitz, as president Lori Beaman was unable to attend the conference. Beaman’s written address, titled “Living Well Together in a (non)Religious Future: Contributions from the Sociology of Religion,” centered largely around the experiences of… sea turtle rescuers. Beaman’s proclamation that she will henceforth be known as the “crazy sea turtle lady” did not deter her from spending most of the allotted hour discussing people’s motivations for rescuing stranded baby sea turtles and the ways this activity has affected their lives and relationships. But what do sea turtle rescuers have to do with the study of religion or nonreligion? Beaman stressed that the “threat” of nonreligion is an ongoing and important social force, creating opportunities for conflict with an established institution. However, this division also creates opportunities for cooperation. Sea turtle rescuers are an example of cooperation: they represent a case of people overcoming worldview differences to participate in shared action that emphasizes similarities across life forms, provides meaning, and “soothes the soul.” In this way, Beaman suggests, “examining sites of action and activism can help us to better understand the contours of both religion and nonreligion.”

The next day, Ryan Cragun convened a joint session with the American Sociological Association titled “What Social Movements Theories Can Tell Us About Nonreligion.” Rhys Williams kicked off the panel by emphasizing cultural context, boundedness, and resonance, and how nonreligious movements will have to overcome the legitimacy of religion in the American context by taking on similar forms but changing the content. Penny Edgell offered both “promises and pitfalls” of a social movement approach to nonreligion. Promises include a focus on identity and the cultural work that it takes to create nonreligious identities and movements. A social movements approach allows for a de-centering of belief and a shift towards lived, institutionalized nonreligion that moves past the dead ends of the secularization debate. However, Edgell argued that not everything should be seen through a social movements lens, and she argued that social movement theories often make the mistake of seeing identity as a “thing” as opposed to a set of belief and values that change over time. She argued for more work on “indifference” and stigma among the nonreligious, both of which require more than a social movements perspective. Joseph Blankholm focused on the “messy etymology of humanism” and the ways the secular humanist movement has co-opted the term to expand what the “secular” can mean. He described the boundary work being done by secular humanist groups as they navigate tax laws and church/state battles and attempt to set themselves apart from other humanist and secular groups, as well as religious organizations.

Linda Woodhead closed the conference Sunday night with the Paul Hanly Furfey lecture titled “Is No Religion the New Religion?” which focused on nonreligion in Britain. (Woodhead also gave this lecture at the British Academy earlier this year, covered in this event report by Lois Lee.) In 1983, 31% of the population identified as religious nones; in 2013, 51% claimed no religious affiliation (more than double what it is in the US). Nones in Britain tend to be liberal and tolerant of diversity. They are more likely than the general population to be white, but there is no significant difference along lines of gender or class (again, unlike the US). Nonreligion is the norm for younger Britons, and 95% of those raised by nonreligious parents will remain nonreligious (only 55% of those raised religious remain so). Only 13% of nones (5% of the total population) are explicitly anti-theist, what Woodhead calls “Dawkins atheists.” Most nones, however, fall somewhere in the middle: they are either nonbelievers or simply not strong believers who practice spirituality in private. Woodhead suggests a Durkheimian approach for studying the nonreligious, focusing on practices relative to the sacred. But what do nones consider sacred? Woodhead notices some trends, including a lack of deference to authority: everyone has the potential to be fulfilled and to make the most of their lives on their own terms. She also described new rituals gaining in popularity in Britain, including prom, preschool graduations, and house parties. These events can be interpreted as a source of collective ritual and intimate connectedness. (Sea turtle rescuers, for instance, may see the environment as providing ritual and connectedness!) These ideals and rituals that nonreligious Britons hold sacred constitutes what Woodhead calls the “new religion.”

The conference was—like Lee writes in her own report of Linda Woodhead’s lecture—a “celebration” of a young field of study that is “really coming into its own.” With too many relevant sessions to report, see this year’s conference program for more of the latest research focusing on nonreligion and secularism. The Association for the Sociology of Religion’s 2017 annual meeting will be held August 12-14 in Montreal, Quebec.

Jacqui Frost is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on non-religious identities and communities and her dissertation is an ethnographic study of the Sunday Assembly, a nascent network of non-religious congregations. As a research fellow with the American Mosaic Project, Jacqui is involved in numerous projects exploring religious and non-religious diversity in American life, including the influence of conservative religiosity on understandings of racial inequality, the rates and patterns of volunteering among the non-religious, and the influence of different non-religious identities on social and political attitudes.

Amanda Schutz is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation research takes a qualitative mixed methods approach to understanding diversity in nonreligious organizations and individual involvement in such groups. Other research looks at atheist identity disclosure and gender differences in nonreligious experiences.