Putting God in Place! Religious continuities and mutations in classic and diasporic communities

Much of past and current sociological research seems to have focused on spiritual experiences within religious or quasi-religious organizations, which obscures possible traces of individual, collective religious and or spiritual experiences, expressions and encounters in secular terrains like the workplace (hospitals, banks, airports, seaports, train stations and industries) and other perceptibly non-religious settings (sports arenas, supermarkets, shopping malls, restaurants, recreational facilities and prisons). Also less probed is whether, how and to what extent individuals consider such experiences and expressions to have an impact on their overall religious/spiritual perspectives and life encounters, or in fact what functions they perform. It is little wonder that many sociologists have heeded Max Weber’s warning about bureaucracies’ ‘parceling-out of the soul’ of workers, thus envisioning the ‘secular’ workplace as a less likely context for spiritual praxis, discourse and experience. As Weber (1943) (quoted in Mayer, 1956: 127) cautioned:

It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones … That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.

Barely two decades later, Harvey Cox’s Secular city (1965) articulated that modern economic life had secularized all that was once sacred in the business worldview and American culture, while Peter Berger in his Sacred canopy opined that the dominant modern worldview of sheer rationality had metamorphosed into a ‘disenchantment of the world’ (1967: 111). Prior to the 1970s, Berger and his contemporaries popularized the thesis that modernity necessarily leads to secularization. Berger was of the view that the presumed secularizing consequence of modernity was rendered plausible by Weber’s thesis of the ‘disenchantment of the world’. He contested that Protestantism was a major driving force behind the disenchantment of the Western world.

However, recent scholarship increasingly suggests that workplaces and businesses are creating ‘holistic’ cultures that allow workers to translate their spiritual beliefs into action, experience the holy and discuss the sacred (Grant et al., 2004). Contrary to Weber, more research illuminates and critiques the ‘exploding’ and ‘imploding’ of spirituality in workplaces. Laura Nash explores religion and business ethics, contrary to the perception that business has no ethics, probing questions that border on the nexus between evangelical belief and running a for-profit corporation. How does Christian faith influence business leadership? Nash’s Believers in business (1994), based on extensive ethnographic research, examines the integration of faith and the systemic structures of business. Relying on interview analysis with over 85 leaders in companies in the publishing, manufacturing, service, financial and communications industries, the book explores the impact, or lack thereof, of personal faith and organized Christianity on the business world, specifically among Christian CEOs. She explains the paradox that while many business people say their faith is crucially important to their business practice, yet few talk about the specific impact their faith has made on particular decisions. She highlights the conflicts that Christians experience in the business world and identifies seven ‘tensions’ between Evangelical Christianity and business. ¹

Social scientists who point to a resurgence or explosion of spirituality in the workplace sometimes raise questions about the origin or recentness of this phenomenon. I recall here Barbara Barnum’s exploration, Spirituality in nursing: From traditional to new age (2003 [1996]). In the preface to the second edition of her book, she stated rather pointedly, ‘Nursing as a discrete profession arose from spirituality, then relegated spirituality to a back seat in its drive to become credible in the academic world. Now, nursing is turning back to see what was lost in this manoeuvre’ (2003: ix). In this illuminating work, she examines topics ranging from the historical roots of nursing in spirituality and competing definitions of spirituality to the evaluation of patients’ spiritual needs. I suspect that Barnum was alluding also to a liminal phase of disconnection between nursing and spirituality, ‘an era of secularization’, within a complex web of historical intercourse. Ironically, some scholars are now beginning to underscore the need to reconfigure the ‘comeback’ of religion/spirituality in workplaces and other secular spaces. More specifically, nursing scholars are giving ample space to the interrogation of spirituality and work, even daring to speak about the need to reintroduce spirituality in nursing and make it the ‘cornerstone of holistic nursing practice’ (see, for instance, Dossey et al., 2000).

Drawing upon their recent sociological research, Grant, O’Neill and Stephens (2004) interrogate the claim, demonstrating through a case study of a university hospital’s nursing staff that spirituality can have a place in a secular bureaucracy’s work culture. They show that ‘even where a large majority of employees believe that their work practices are spiritual, they experience the sacred in a variety of ways, and are eager to talk about spirituality, they may have other experiences that cause them to doubt spirituality’s relevance, and they may perceive talk about spirituality to be unwelcome’ (2004: 266). As they further contend: ‘if it appears to sociologists that spirituality cannot take root within secular bureaucracies, it may be because their theories have not yet allowed it’ (2004: 281).

These ‘new’ ways of thinking among social scientists and nursing scholars might even leave one pondering whether in fact they point to the failure of the academy to see ‘beneath the veil’. Could our inability to capture this phenomenon in the past, but perhaps also in the present, hinge on a definitional confusion, and the compartmentalization of the ‘religious/sacred’ and ‘secular’ domains as rather water-tight, fixed entities and categories? This is akin to the secularization and de-secularization discourse that has attracted our scholarly gaze time and again. Even where assertions and developments are adjudged to make sense in some contexts, we are left pondering on their universalizability. I shall return to these issues later on.

Wendy Cadge and Deirdre Meintel are among the few social scientists who are beginning to chart new empirical pathways and directing interest towards the sociology of religion and spirituality in workplaces in an era of increasing individualization. Below, I provide some critical reflections on Wendy Cadge’s and Deirdre Meintel’s contributions to this volume, which address the sub-theme Continuities and mutations in classic and diasporic communities within the wider discursive template, Rethinking community: Religious continuities and mutation in late modernity, of the 32nd ISSR conference in Turku, Finland.

Wendy Cadge brings her ethnographic expertise in religion and spirituality outside traditional religious organizations to bear in addressing complex theoretical issues of religion and community life. Specifically, she explores how religion and spirituality are present in large academic hospitals in the United States – and what conclusions we should draw from that. This comes from a larger project, a co-edited work (Bender et al., 2013), which critiques sociological conversations that seem to focus on religion in the US (rather than around the world), on Christianity (rather than a range of traditions) and on how religion happens in congregations (rather than other settings). Cadge’s main contribution in the present article is her questioning of how we should conceptualize religion outside of congregations and other traditional religious organizations. Specifically, she is interested in how to study religion and spirituality in organizations that are formally secular and why it is important to do so. She raises pertinent questions about how we think about religion in relation to community and points to ‘the importance of considering how and why religion and spirituality are present in seemingly secular settings’ (2013b: 2).

In trying to understand how secular healthcare organizations think about and respond to religion and spirituality, how the public and not so public forms religion and spirituality take in healthcare organizations, the reasons they take these forms, and the ways that staff members act around them in their daily work, Cadge explores the historical and policy contexts that shape the visibility of religion and spirituality in hospitals – the formal presence of religion and spirituality as manifested and represented in spaces such as hospital chapels and prayer rooms and from the work of chaplains. Cadge (2013a: 180–200) recommends that her ‘storytelling’ is best captured in layers focused on different aspects of these complex organizations: first, the historical and policy contexts; second, the physical space set aside for religion and spirituality in healthcare organizations like chapels and meditation rooms; third, the work of chaplains; fourth, the informal ways religion and spirituality come up in intensive care units; and last, in relation to death because often when religion or spirituality is mentioned publicly or privately in healthcare it is linked to end-of-life issues. Nonetheless, while her chapter in the book Religion on the Edge (Bender et al., 2013: 180–200) treats these five layers in detail.

First, Cadge (2013b: 7) aptly observes shifting institutional contours and mobility

from spaces that are specific to particular religious traditions to those that are more neutral or interfaith in which religious objects and furniture are on wheels, versatility and flexibility are emphasized, and names have shifted from chapel to meditation or prayer room.

Second, she suggests a kind of de-materialising of religion or the anonymization of religious forms and symbols in public spaces. According to her,

rather than filling their chapels [and] prayer and meditation rooms with the widest possible range of religious and spiritual symbols and visibly naming religion in its multiple forms … chaplains and hospitals in the U.S. seem to be doing the opposite as they empty them of such symbols. (2013b: 7)

Cadge notes this as one strategy for responding to religious diversity in public contexts but ‘one that minimizes rather than embraces differences’ (7). The shift described here, as she notes, ‘is also evident amongst chaplains who have transitioned from being tradition specific to interfaith and to being staffed by unit rather than tradition’ (7).

On the other hand, Meintel (this issue) takes up the role of collectivities in exploring the individualization of religion particularly in smaller, more marginal spiritualities.

These newer ‘varieties of religion’ most often seem mobilized by French-speaking, Catholic-raised Quebecois and brought into their personal spiritual syntheses, along with strong Catholic influence in many cases, producing highly individualized spiritual amalgams.

She draws from her larger ethnographic project involving a robust mapping of the local Quebec contemporary spiritual marketplace, an endeavour that privileges the individualization of religion, but also religious agency. The focus was on groups that represent the important social and religious changes dating from the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, a period of rapid secularization that saw the loss of social hegemony by the Catholic Church along with its control of major social institutions, and a liberalization of religion as the province became open to an array of religions and spiritualities. Since then, factors associated with globalization have exacerbated the trend towards religious diversity; these include more diversified immigration, the increased mobility of the population in general, and the spread of new communication technologies.

In this essay, Meintel observes that there is a great deal of circulation by individuals between different types of religious/spiritual groups, much individualized bricolage, some groups presenting ‘a veritable kaleidoscope of individual constellations of practices, beliefs, religious attendance and participation’ (this issue). With these vivid examples, she demonstrates ways in which ‘religious sociality’ continues to be indispensable even for those who have developed idiosyncratic syntheses of religious practice and belief. Here, Meintel teases out the uniqueness of religious sociality and its particular power. While she recognizes this tendency among other religious collectivities, including immigrants, she nonetheless devotes her attention to individualized spiritualities among non-immigrants here. Meintel also deals with intricate issues and conflicting regimes of authenticity to further our understanding of what religious sociality means today, although one misses out on how the dynamics of power play out in these conflicting regimes of authenticity.

Both Cadge’s and Meintel’s essays bring rich theoretical insights to the table and empirical freshness in analyzing religious continuities and mutations, although one must add that they hardly deal with the thematic focus ‘diasporic communities’. I am also unsure in what sense the communities they deal with can be categorized as ‘classic’. At least, I did not read of any specific mention, definition or reference to a classic community. Although, Meintel alludes to the ethnographic mapping in a larger project of the Québécois local spiritual marketplace, including immigrant religiosities, she states unequivocally that the essay’s focus is on the ‘individualized spiritualities’ particularly noticeable among non-immigrants.

As one also engaged in contemporary research amongst immigrant and diasporic contexts, I was particularly looking forward to a contrasting of the intricate interactions between religion and community life within classic and diasporic communities; and the problematization of the notion of ‘religious community’; but also to a discussion of how religious continuities and mutation take place at the same time. I experienced a little frustration that this was not specifically captured by either essay, although the religious praxes described in the communities under discussion were in some ways treated as ‘marginal spiritualities’. In exploring religion and spirituality outside traditional religious organizations and within non-religious spaces, it is expedient to contrast varying communities such as the diasporic with recent immigrant communities; but also the diasporic/immigrant communities with the host societies. This is against the backdrop of increasingly religiously pluralistic Western contexts, and their varied perceptions and experiences of the sacred and non-sacred.

It seems that there is an enduring tendency among social scientists to appropriate the conventional image of organized religion, such as church-oriented religiosity, as a reference point in unpacking notions and configurations of the sacred. Again, this is implicated by the definitions and artificial dichotomy we create between sacred and secular domains. In non-Western contexts such as Africa, the gulf between sacred and secular spaces, entities and actions is rather fluid, dynamic and imaginary.

The discourse on secularization is also skewed when scholars point uncritically to the waning social influence of organized religion, coupled with dwindling membership at the level of church-oriented religiosity, as an indicator of secularization. Whether we talk about secularization or laicization as visible indicators and consequences of modernity, it is not yet proven whether, how and to what extent these social-religious developments occur in other geo-cultural contexts beyond Europe and North America. In non-Western contexts, religious traditions and spiritualities continue to thrive in ways that make the secularization debate unviable in these settings. In contrast to Europe and North America, where it is argued that institutionalized religious traditions, particularly Christianity, are being eroded by secularizing forces, authoritative beliefs and practices informed by tradition still hold sway – whether it be Buddhism and Hinduism in Sri Lanka or Islam in Pakistan (Heelas, 2002: 357).

Africa is one continent but several worlds, characterized by cultural, religious and linguistic variety and diverse historical experiences. Nonetheless, religious/spiritual vitality and revitalization are pronounced (Adogame, 2009). There is a shared creativity among Africans in their expression of their individual and collective experiences through religion, be it African Christianity, African Islam or indigenous religious traditions and spiritualities. Far from being remotely abstract, the worldview is grounded upon a sustained reality in the existence of supramundane entities and their encounter with human life-worlds. The beliefs and rituals associated with spiritual forces constitute a distinctively indigenous pattern of religious thought and action (Adogame, 2007). The religious/spiritual cosmos is characterized by a multiplicity of divinities, spirits and ancestors; and beliefs and practices concerning them are a dominant element. Most Africans, whether converted to Christianity or Islam or not, still share a belief in their deities and ancestors integral to an ontology of invisible beings. These beliefs in incorporeal spiritual forces and the ritual attitude towards them mean that most Africans cannot fully accept scientific theories in the West that are inconsistent with it.

In the face of such religious sensibilities, does the secularization and desecularization thesis have universal applicability or how far can we generalize on the assertions? In many cases, the mapping of European and North American religious landscapes by social scientists undermines the religious demography of immigrant and diasporic communities, not only in terms of the way they contribute to the religious/spiritual diversification and re-configuring of Western societies, but also in how they critique, respond to and challenge perceived processes of secularization and modernity.

A common example is the ‘Easternization of the West’ (Campbell, 2008), the process whereby oriental and eastern-related religions and spiritualities are increasingly absorbed in or carving a niche into the cultural life of the West, often giving rise to new, hybridized forms of religion and spirituality. In this provocative book, Colin Campbell vividly illustrates that the civilization of the West is undergoing a revolutionary process of change, one in which features that have characterized the West for two thousand years are in the process of being marginalized, to be replaced by those more often associated with the civilizations of the East. Besides these oriental religiosities/spiritualities, African religions and spiritualities are proliferating rapidly in Europe and North America, heightened by migration, the appropriation of new media technologies and the transport revolution. This new religious ferment complicates the simple, one-sided picturing of the contemporary Western religious and spiritual marketplace.

In the same vein, the growing scholarly preference for the concepts ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ as alternative templates to ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ is often conjectured as a backlash to and a critique of the hegemonic stance and historical excesses of ‘organized religion’, in this case Christianity. In this regard, ‘spirituality’ is hardly perceived as an integral aspect of ‘organized religion’, but is now often treated as a discrete phenomenon. For example, how is ‘Christian spirituality’ or ‘Islamic spirituality’ to be understood and contrasted with ‘spirituality’ conceptualized as non-organized, non-institutionalized, let alone with individualized religious or spiritual praxis? Are ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ strange bedfellows? Are they two different phenomena, or different ways of expressing a similar feature? How similar or different are religiosity and spirituality, or are these vague concepts with fuzzy edges?

The very concept ‘religion’ is a Western invention, an academic construct involving both misconceptions and changing perceptions that hardly does justice to the complexity of African spiritualities. While we continue to use the concept religion to embrace African spiritualities, we should be aware of its limitations and tendency to obscure their dynamism. To explain African spiritualities and religious life in terms of Western categories can be informing and illuminating and offer useful insights – just as it can be misleading and obscuring. African modes of thought, ritual patterns and symbolism that are integral to African religious worlds are sometimes puzzling to Western ethnographers.

In the case of Western societies, Paul Heelas (2002) notes that the distinction between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’, and therefore what these terms have come to mean for many people, has been long in the making. And the distinction has come into greater prominence since the 1960s. Describing the perceptive transition as a ‘spiritual revolution’, Heelas remarks further: ‘the shift from religion to spirituality would “appear” to be associated with advanced industrial society’ (2002: 358). In actual fact, some previous work attempting to distinguish spirituality from religiosity suggests that there may be several points of convergence and divergence between the two constructs (see Pargament et al., 1995).

Matthew Wood (2010) provides a detailed epistemological, theoretical and methodological critique of the sociology of spirituality. He notes that the period since the turn of the millennium has seen the concept of ‘spirituality’ gain even greater purchase within the sociology of religion (2010: 267). He details how, in reaction to what are seen to be the failings of the concept of ‘religion’, scholars have employed ‘spirituality’ to describe and interpret certain shifts that they deem to be occurring in contemporary, particularly Euro-American, societies. According to Wood, ‘underlying various meanings, sociologists use the term “spirituality” to describe people as [sic] exercising their own authority’ (267). As he further contends:

By positing the existence of self-authority, the sociology of spirituality abnegates a properly sociological interpretation of the phenomenon it addresses. Through its conceptual distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality,’ this sociology lifts people out of their social contexts, with the result that it fails adequately to address social practice, social interaction, and the wider contexts of people’s lives and biographies. (Wood, 2010: 267)

Beyond the rather vague definitions and conceptualizations offered by many social scientists, the perception and appropriation of spirituality as a ‘lived practice’ enables individuals to integrate the spiritual and material dimensions of life (Grant et al., 2004: 268). Two of the few sociologists of contemporary religion that have contributed to the shifting of our scholarly gaze from religion to spirituality, and in building a model of the sacred that identifies the dimensions of workplace spirituality that need to be examined are Robert Wuthnow and Wade Clark Roof.

Wuthnow defines spirituality as consisting ‘of all beliefs and activities by which individuals attempt to relate their lives to a divine being or some other concept of transcendent reality’ (Wuthnow, 1998: viii). His Sharing the journey contains ample examples linking the success of the small group movement to the attention it pays to spirituality. He underscores the transition of spirituality from the 1950s to more recent times in terms of a ‘spirituality of dwelling, seeking and practice’. The last approach, ‘a spirituality of practice’, is based on devotional and social activities that provide space for individuals to relate their lives to the divine in systematic and committed ways (Grant et al., 2004: 268). Wuthnow (1998) suggests that more and more white-collar workers view the services they provide as small, spiritual acts of caring. He believes that although a spirituality of practice may contribute to the unchurching of America, it has sparked a resurgence in spiritual values and is especially well suited to today’s fluid world.

Roof provides a more systematic analysis based on his large-scale study Spiritual marketplace (1999), which breaks down his samples into many categories, showing that 73 per cent of those surveyed prefer to use the language of ‘spirituality’ rather than ‘religion’. Roof demonstrates that the locus of authority in spirituality is not merely the individual, but the ‘self’, in what he calls ‘reflexive spirituality’. Roof claims that ‘in a real sense, the self is elevated to a higher level of making spiritual choices and negotiating frameworks of meaning drawing off institutional and more popular-based religious discourses [sic]’ (1999: 42).

We also need to pay increasing attention to the fluidity and malleability of spaces. Grant et al. (2004) call attention to the need to be open to the possibility that non-religious organizations are subject to the twin forces of sacralization and secularization. Therefore, questions about who performs sacred activities can be studied in these seemingly public, mundane settings as well. Cadge, in her research on spirituality in American hospitals, vividly underscores how religious/spiritual practices may be resilient and mutable, portable and adaptable; but also how spirituality as practised outside the parameters of organized religion can retain its importance. This naturally leads me to make some additional comments on Meintel’s illuminating contribution.

In addition to secularization theory (Dobbelaere, 2002; Bruce, 2002) and the economic market model (Stark and Finke, 2000), which has remained topical among social scientists in the past few decades, a third perspective, the religious individualization thesis, which clearly contrasts with the first two theories, has gained prominence among some sociologists of religion (Davie, 1994; Hervieu-Léger, 2000). Central to this thesis is the claim that modernization processes will not necessarily result in the social extinction of religion, but rather in a change in and transformation of its social forms. Proponents of this thesis contend that the decline of organized religion is coterminous with an increase in individual religiosity and does not indicate a loss of religiousness for the individual. By extension, institutionalized religions are seen to be increasingly supplanted by subjective forms of religion, mostly with the short-cut label of ‘spiritualities’. The process of religious individualization signifies that individual religiosity will assume a multifaceted, syncretic and alienated stance in contradistinction to organized religion such as the church.

It is partly against this backdrop that Meintel’s present article and larger research project can be better understood. She is convincing in explicating the complex religious landscape of Quebec via the multiple prisms not only of secularization and liberalization, but also of factors often associated with globalization, such as more diversified immigration, increased population mobility, and the spread of new communication technologies. It is not sufficiently clear in this article, though, how globalization has dramatically expanded the range of religious resources available in Quebec. The individualization of religious life is a mark not simply of secularization but of religious transformation. The question that still remains in my mind is whether the individualization of religion is a product of secularization, an integral aspect of it or both?

I would like to come back briefly to the question of multiple participation: the mobility and circulation by individuals between different types of religious/spiritual groups. I contend that this tendency, which has been perceived as an aberration, particularly within Western ‘ecclesial’ contexts, is a feature considered normal and usual in other religio-cultural settings. This can be contrasted with the popular Western image of an individual’s affiliation with a denomination as fixed and bounded. The appropriation of the term ‘religious resources’ as something to ‘tap from’ and ‘to belong to’ becomes clear as a process that is not often treated as incompatible or mutually exclusive with the individualization of religion: what Meintel calls ‘tools for transcendence’, a means to have a direct, often healing, contact with the Sacred. In this vein, I would ask: How new is this new kind of ‘religious sociality’ in which the religious agency that is implied by the individualization of religion carries its own burdens? I am unsure to what extent and how often the participants’ spiritual practices involve considerable personal inconvenience. Do the participants really believe that their spiritual practices involve considerable inconvenience? It seems to me that we can attain a better grasp of what religious sociality offers to its participants by further exploring these new religious subjectivities and processes of building spiritual (religious) and social capital, and paying particular attention to the upsides and downsides of capital formation.

There is also a tendency to essentialize these individualized spiritualities in terms of the religious community they create, whether virtual, real or imagined. Most institutionalized religious communities had their beginnings in a nuclear group, sometimes centred around an individual or a group of individuals. Regarding their appropriation of new media technologies, it is rather striking to note generalizations such as ‘proselytism is unheard of’ and ‘nonreligious social activities are rare’. One wonders if it is not hasty to draw such general conclusions in a complex spiritual market that is still unfolding.

In conclusion, in spite of the critical observations I have made on both essays, may I suggest that the theoretical and conceptual issues they bring to the table from their ethnographic data and rich analysis are profoundly enriching and illuminating, and thus far outweigh any identifiable limitations from such time-bounded presentations. I would therefore like to end with words of appreciation for Cadge and Meintel for their thought-provoking contributions to a growing debate.