Abstract
Book reviewed
In the 1960s and 1970s, the sociology of religion flourished in British universities under the influence of David Martin at the London School of Economics and Bryan Wilson at All Souls College, Oxford. Sociologists went about studying religious institutions in a period of decline as measured by falling membership, shrinking influence, declining prestige of the ministry, and contracting financial support. Martin offered a comparative and critical view of secularization in his A General Theory of Secularization (1978), but perhaps the dominant view came from Wilson, whose work on the sociology of sects and society defined ‘secularization’ in relatively simple terms as institutional erosion. His Religion in Secular Society (1966) established the theoretical paradigm for sociological research for many decades. While sectarian religion could inject some enthusiasm into religious life, sects, especially sects with a commitment to the evangelical conversion of society, would eventually evolve into denominations, thereby losing their fervour. We might modify this picture of religious decline in Britain by claiming that organized religion did play a part in political campaigns where Methodism, for example, was important in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Anglican College of the Resurrection in Leeds had close connections with the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa. However, in general terms, the churches had become increasingly irrelevant to public affairs in the United Kingdom apart from ritual events such as the coronation of Elizabeth II.
Wilson’s interpretation was primarily directed at European societies, but he did attempt to explain American exceptionalism, namely, the on-going importance of religion in American society. As a cultural conservative, Wilson argued that Christianity survived in the United States, but only by surrendering its contents to the new consumer culture of the post-war period. Starting from a different perspective, Peter Berger (1967) in The Sacred Canopy came to a similar conclusion, arguing that religious competition in the United States produced a super-market of religious consumption. Consequently, what he called ‘the plausibility structures’ of religious institutions were compromised by the infinite pluralism of religious options in which spirituality had evolved as a life-style. For various reasons, these theories of unilinear secularization and modernization were abandoned by sociologists towards the end of the last century.
What explains the change in sociological understanding secularization? The following reasons are important. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of organized communism in Europe led to the re-emergence of organized religion in Eastern Europe and Russia. The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has become important as an aspect of the legitimation of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime, following his re-election in 2012. A partial relaxation of atheist policies in China after the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, perhaps first announced in his ‘Priority should be given to scientific research’ in 1975 has allowed some restoration of religious freedom. Sociological interest in religious growth in contemporary China is clearly recognized in the research of scholars such as Fenggang Yang (2012) in Religion in China. Second, the impact of globalization theory has forced sociologists to look beyond the narrow confines of their own societies to develop a greater sensitivity to other religious traditions outside the Judaeo-Christian world. Roland Robertson’s work was influential in this re-orientation in Meaning and Change (1978) and Globalization (1992), but Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) pinpointed many of the underlying narrow presuppositions – the pre-judgements or prejudices – of both the humanities and social sciences with respect to other cultures. Third, with globalization came the liberalization of labour markets and the free flow of labour to Western economies, and hence the growth of minorities and diasporic cultures. Sociologists were forced with greater self-awareness to examine a new agenda for the social sciences – multiculturalism, cultural diversity, identity politics, post-colonial studies, legal pluralism, and the erosion of the nation state. In particular, religious terrorism emerged after 9/11 as a major preoccupation of governments and hence of their scientific advisors. Fourth, religion appears to be deeply involved in global political violence. The rise of Islamic radicalism is the obvious example, but the instances of religious violence are far more widespread in Myanmar, southern Thailand, Egypt, the Moluccas, and Chechnya. There is a global conflict between Shia and Sunni Islam, stretching from the Middle East to South-east Asia. Even conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland refuses to go away despite the Good Friday Agreement and the ‘Peace Process’. Religion was no longer seen as a declining feature of modernization, but appeared to be in the cockpit of (violent) social change. Finally, we can regard the re-evaluation of secularization as a manifestation of a broader reconsideration of modernization theory. In development studies, for example, Daniel Lerner’s (1958) study of Turkish society in The Passing of Traditional Society had been influential in how sociologists studied the evolution of traditional societies from stationary village life to bustling urban modernity. In contemporary social sciences, we are more attuned to the problems of modernity – pollution, urban squalor, poverty, over-crowding, random violence, global warming, new wars, state corruption and terrorism – than to its benefits. The self-confidence of sociologists regarding the future, from Herbert Spencer to Talcott Parsons, has evaporated in the face of a widespread sense of the failures of modernity and impending social and environmental catastrophe.
One consequence of these developments has been a growing prominence of research on religion in the social sciences. A variety of publications have marked the ‘religious turn’: Jose Casanova’s (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World; Mark Juergensmeyer’s (2000) Terror on the Mind of God; Jürgen Habermas’s (2006) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, in European Journal of Philosophy; and Charles Taylor’s (2007) A Secular Age. These publications in sociology and philosophy were addressed to the more general influence of liberal thinkers such as John Rawls (1993), whose political philosophy in Political Liberalism, especially his notion of overlapping fundamental beliefs, is seen to be highly relevant to the problems of diverse multicultural and multi-faith societies. Berger (1999) abandoned his secularization thesis to recognize a re-sacralization of society and Martin (2002) has focused his research on the world-wide growth of Pentecostalism. Perhaps at no other time since Max Weber’s essays in sociology of religion has religion been so dominant in public and academic debate. This edited collection on Nordic secularities (van den Breemer et al., 2014) can be regarded as a contribution to the debate on post-secular society in the recent interventions of Habermas into the complicated political issues surrounding the obligations of citizens in socially diverse communities (Lafont, 2013). Given the intertwinement of the secular and the sacred in time and space, how can liberal societies best manage the diverse tensions that emerge regarding asylum, penitentiaries, graveyards, hospitals, medical clinics, settlements, and so forth, especially when the cultures and interests of majorities and minorities appear to clash? Given the obvious success of Nordic societies as social democratic societies with their tradition of universalistic welfare provision, how can they sustain these traditions when confronted by the challenge of social and religious diversity?
This collection of original essays is important, if for no other reason than it identifies the Scandinavian example as both unique and important. Furthermore, sociologists of religion have largely neglected the Scandinavian experience in their analysis of European secularization. The editors correctly note that these case studies from the Nordic world throw an important and different light on the varieties of secularity in the West. It underlines the notion that secularization as a unified and linear process in the West is misleading. In fact, the book identifies different versions of the Scandinavian experience, namely, West Nordic (Denmark, Norway, the Faeroe Islands, and Iceland) and East Nordic (Sweden and Finland). This regional division is discussed, in the chapter by Dagh Thorkildsen, as an outcome of different alliances during the Second World War. In the Lutheran tradition, the churches were state churches. Until the nineteenth century, religion gave legitimacy to the state and confession defined the territory of the state. The clergy were the largest and most important component of state administration. Hence these churches are often referred to as National Churches. Historically, in Denmark, Norway, the Faeroe Islands and Iceland, Lutheranism typically involved the integration of church and state. In Finland and Sweden, the Reformation was connected with emancipation from Denmark, and their confessional character also included Calvinism and Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. As a consequence the Church of Sweden as a High Church, rather like the Church of England, remained more autonomous from the state. Denmark and Norway were Low Church and integrated into the state. Despite these regional differences, there was a common process in which ‘The Nordic societies underwent a process of transition from a pre-modern agrarian society’, during which time ‘[m]odernity was first of all expressed through religious revivalism’ (p. 97). The main thrust of Secular and Sacred? is to explore the historical legacy of Lutheranism for the social and political organization of contemporary Scandinavian societies.
The basic idea in the book, then, is the notion of the ‘intertwinement’ of the secular and the sacred. The idea of intertwinement is taken from an article by Lisbet Christoffersen (2006) in the Nordic Journal of Religion and Society. Christoffersen explores many of these issues in regard to the problems raised by the asylum of Iraqi migrants in Copenhagen where the traditional sanctuary of the church was challenged by the state. Various chapters treat this intertwinement in its historical, spatial and dogmatic forms. As Christoffensen demonstrates, asylum raises questions that are not just empirical, but inevitably ethical and theological, because the traditional role of the church as a place of sanctuary is often breached by the police in the name of security and enforcement. Similar issues are raised by Trygve Wyller in his chapter on the spaces that give protection to undocumented and vulnerable migrants. Yet another chapter by Knut W. Ruyter examines the ambiguous nature of spatial arrangements that can be both secular and sacred, in his account of public hospitals. Patients find comfort in their religious practice and hospital chaplains offer important religious services alongside secular medical practitioners. In American sociology, Wendy Cadge (2012), in her Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine, has also challenged simplistic views of secularization as differentiation, through her analysis of the occupational role of chaplains. These case studies raise important questions that lie at the interface between ethical discussion and sociological analysis.
Thus, one interesting feature of this collection is its strong interdisciplinary perspective in which theological, historical and sociological approaches are carefully blended together. One might say there is, as a result, a successful intertwinement of disciplines. The key issue in Scandinavian religious history comes from Luther’s theology of the two kingdoms – the secular and the spiritual world – and their inevitable and necessary inter-connectedness. In his chapter, John Witte Jr provides a sophisticated theological account of Luther’s political theory, in which, while there is a separation of the earthly and heavenly kingdoms, God is still hidden in the earthly kingdom. The point of this volume then is to explore the sacrality that is hidden in the secular. For Witte, the very secular success of the Nordic countries is a direct consequence of this Lutheran legacy. This religious substratum – the hiddenness of God – ‘has provided a powerful but often forgotten foundation to the communal harmony and individual happiness in the Nordic lands’ (p. 57). Within a sociological interpretation of the two kingdoms doctrine, Casanova (p. 24) notes that the Nordic pattern ‘does not lead to differentiation between or separation of the religious and the secular but to a peculiar integration, a sharing of space, or a blending between the two’. This social and political blending from a sociological perspective is deeply institutional and each chapter in this collection explores this intertwinement in terms of the relations between law and religion, bishops and the state, the organization of welfare, hospitals and religion, the management of graveyards, and the relationship between different religious communities. The specific message of this volume is therefore that in the Lutheran societies of northern Europe, the relationship between church and state has been one of institutional intertwinement rather than differentiation, specialization and separation. These Scandinavian case studies argue in favour of what Casanova refers to as ‘the heterogeneity of the secular’ (p. 27).
The general view of historians has been that the Reformation meant that canon law was abolished, and ultimately national governments rather than religious bodies managed religious affairs. The Reformation settlement did require the privatization of religious consciousness, but it did not involve any simple or complete separation of state and church. In the Scandinavian case, Lutheranism meant a significant intertwinement of the two spheres. The long-term consequence of the Reformation and its ‘state-led confessionalisation’ was not secular homogeneity but rather the creation of ‘a homogeneously Protestant North, a homogeneously Catholic South and three bi-confessional societies in between, Holland, Germany and Switzerland, with their own patterns of internal territorial confessionalisation based on confessional “pillars”, territories or cantons’ (p. 27). While this general description is a valuable sketch of the religious map of Europe, we may wish to treat the United Kingdom as a special case in which the fringes were either Catholic (Eire) or Presbyterian (lowland Scotland) and where the Anglicanism of the English mainland was always a complex blend of High and Low Church.
These Lutheran societies are therefore interesting from the perspective of comparative sociology of religion. We are familiar with the argument that in American Protestantism, while religion was heavily involved in public life through voluntary associations in the civil sphere, there was a constitutional wall separating church and state. In the Lutheran case, there is an intertwinement of religion and secularity at the state level. Although Norway and Sweden have been disestablished, organized religion continues to be an essential element in public life. Furthermore, this fusion of the religious and the political is not simply a consequence of historical contingency but of contemporary political choices.
Intertwinement in Scandinavia has often taken different routes. In the low churches of Norway and Denmark, intertwinement is manifest at the municipal level and hence the municipality was given responsibility for financing and maintaining the local church. This localization of intertwinement is clearly illustrated in the chapter by Rosemarie van den Breemer on ‘graveyards and secularism in Norway’. In 1996, at a time when Norway was becoming more diverse in cultural and religious terms, a new Funeral Act was adopted, transferring administrative responsibility for graveyards to a church body called the Joint Parish Council. Consequently graveyard employees became church employees. The specific issue with Norwegian graveyards is how to treat minorities (such as humanists and Muslims) equally while enforcing the responsibility of the local church for the management of graveyards. Understanding this and related developments requires a re-orientation of social theory to consider the specific contexts in which the secular and sacred are related, and this re-orientation leads to a more dynamic comprehension of the multiplicities of the secular.
Throughout this collection, there is an underlying theme, namely, the crisis of secular society. In the opening discussion we are told: ‘The crisis of modern Western secularity has prompted analysis of the category of the secular’, the notion of a uniform and unilear modernization process has ‘given way to an investigation into the variety of secularities, secularizations and secularisms’, and finally the ‘distinctively Lutheran brand of Protestantism poses a challenge to our theories of secularization and our concepts of the secularity’ (p. 9). Similarly, Casanova declares in the opening section of his contribution that: [His] paper examines the changing interconnections between the temporal and the spatial dimension of the secular. It argues that the contemporary crisis of Western secular modernity, and of the secularist philosophy of history that went with it, has opened up the space to study the heterogeneity of the secular and simultaneously forces every form of political secularism, as the doctrine that has the task of defining the proper place of religion in public spaces, to self-redefinition. (p. 21)
Starting with the idea of a crisis of secular society, we can claim that the liberal framework of civic tolerance that was originally established by John Locke and by the American Constitution regarding the institutional separation of church and state is breaking down and that the secular state is searching for solutions to the management of public religions. I have already gestured towards the range of such problems: the veil, Shari’a, gay marriage, circumcision and children’s rights, and homosexuality in public life, such as the military. The paradox of the liberal state is that it cannot create the conditions in civil society that would make possible a liberal state. In late capitalism in particular, we appear to be a long way from achieving any overlapping consensus of fundamental beliefs, and the decline of the welfare state, which once was the social glue of societies otherwise divided by social classes, makes the achievement of any form of consensus highly problematic. This paradox is ultimately why the solutions offered by Rawls and Habermas cannot work.
If we take the theory of intertwinement seriously, then the crisis of liberal secularism has a parallel crisis in religion with which it is interconnected. The missing theme in this volume is the parallel and intertwined crisis of religion alongside the crisis of secular society. Lutheranism in the Scandinavian societies cannot be easily secularized, because the churches are intertwined with the state. The paradox is that this institutional strength of the church–state intertwinement is matched, as all the authors agree, by a general decline in church attendance, membership and belief. Thus, secularization in the analysis developed by Bryan Wilson – a decline in religious participation and belief – is taking place in Scandinavian societies, but it is matched by this peculiar interconnectedness between church and state. The crisis of religion is the general growth in the so-called ‘nones’ – young people with no religious preference and no connection with the institutional church – alongside an overall weakening of religious institutions. The examples of public religions – the Iranian Revolution, Solidarity in Poland, Liberation Theology in Latin America, and the Moral Majority – that were so convincingly analysed in Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World were important in the twentieth century, but they have come to an end. Institutionalized religion no longer plays a significant role in the public sphere and religion has become individualized. Sociologists have described this development in various ways as ‘believing without belonging’ with the growth of spirituality, namely, the growth of post-institutional and post-orthodox forms of youth religiosity. Until recently, this form of secularization was seen to be a specific issue for mainstream Protestant denominations, but we now see major problems within the Roman Catholic Church regarding various sexual and financial scandals, resulting in a general crisis of authority and legitimacy.
I shall define this crisis as follows: with every debate in modern society involving some radical social change (of the family, marriage, sexuality, identity, the body, culture, institutions), there is an unavoidable clash between law, public opinion, tradition, morality and organized religion. In the West, the state and the law appear to be dismantling traditional Christian dogma with respect to same-sex marriage, gender equality, circumcision, homosexuality in the military and the Boy Scouts, evolutionary theory and education, abortion and abortion clinics. There is obviously a backlash against these developments as various states in America, under pressure from various lobby groups (Christian fundamentalists, the Tea Party, the Mormons and the Roman Catholic Church), attempt to stave off liberal values, especially over abortion and same-sex marriage.
Secular and Sacred? explores intertwinement through a number of dimensions, but the relationship between law and religion is a basic theme common to most of the chapters. It is worthwhile dwelling on this issue of the relationships between secular law, the state and religion. These issues raise an intriguing question: is law driving public opinion or is public opinion driving law? Although there is in the United States increasing tolerance of homosexuality, on many issues, legal decisions appear to be in tension with or ahead of public opinion. The debate about same-sex marriage in the United States is perhaps the best example of this thesis. When the religion of the majority is under threat from the state, then there is a crisis of confidence and ultimately of legitimacy.
Michael Klarman in From the Closet to the Altar (2013) presents a comprehensive history of legislation relating to same-sex marriage in America, in which he concludes that gay marriage is ‘inevitable’. There are several compelling reasons for his conclusion. First, as more gay men and women have come out of the closet, society has become more gay-friendly. Gay relationships and culture are increasing portrayed in the media without stigma in a positive light. Knowing somebody who is gay is one factor that strongly predicts support for gay rights. For example, in 1985, only a quarter of Americans reported knowing somebody who was gay, but by 2000, this number had grown to 75 per cent. Second, gay marriage is inevitable, because it is strongly supported by young people. A poll in 2011 found that 65 per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 were supportive. In white evangelical Protestant churches, 44 per cent of those aged between 18 and 29 years supported gay marriage. A third reason is that as society has become more accepting of homosexuality, opposition to gay marriage becomes more remote and untenable. His final reason is simply economic. Being anti-gay is bad for business, especially for tourism.
Klarman’s study has important implications for the sociology of religion. Opposition to gay marriage in the United States has come from the Roman Catholic bishops, evangelical Protestant denominations and the Mormon Church. We should therefore read From the Closet to the Altar against the background of Casanova’s original analysis of public religions. Klarman’s study shows that the campaign of the Moral Majority (and allied groups) has failed and that gay marriage is inevitable, despite the backlash from conservative states. Young Christians appear to support gay rights not as a religious issue, but simply on the basis of secular egalitarian values. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is regarded by the law as equivalent to discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and race, and cannot be accepted as grounds for social discrimination in a modern democracy. The electoral defeat of the Republicans has forced the leadership to rethink their position on a variety of issues regarding sexuality, and they have concluded that they cannot win elections on the platform offered by the Tea Party.
Many of these controversies in the public domain are a product of growing social diversity. Despite all the talk about cultural and religious diversity, concern about ‘diversity’ and ‘the crisis of multiculturalism’ really means concern about the problem of Muslim communities in Western liberal democracies (Cesari, 2013). There is an additional problem in Europe with the growing presence of the Roma as a stigmatized minority. Leaving to one side the presence of nomadic communities such as the Laps, historically, the Scandinavian societies have been relatively homogenous in terms of ethnicity, language and religion. The recent growth in social diversity is now the real challenge to the social democratic tradition in Scandinavia. The issue is how to integrate Muslim minorities into societies with a Lutheran hegemony and how to manage the growth of Islamophobia. The Nordic societies have an important reputation for their support of human rights worldwide (see the chapter by Pal Ketil Botvar and Anders Sjoborg), but the civil liberties tradition of Norway was severely tested in 2011 with the massacre of young Norwegians by Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo and on the island of Utoya. The growth of the Norwegian Defence League, which may imitate the English Defence League, is one version of a general growth in xenophobia in Europe. Right-wing movements across Europe are a response to Muslim migration, the Roma, and other minorities. Norway is of course not the only society to experience these problems, which are now widespread in Europe and manifest in the Danish cartoon crisis, the Swiss minaret crisis, Russian protests against migrants, the Italian Northern League and, most challenging, the Golden Dawn in Greece. These political problems are fuelled by economic decline in Europe, the attempt to control state expenditure through austerity packages, and high levels of youth unemployment, especially in southern Europe from Portugal to Greece. How do these problems about minorities relate to the intertwinement of the religious and the political in modernity? We can conclude that religion is bound up with a wide-ranging crisis in secular liberal democracies.
Various chapters in this volume have been inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, who is important for these authors in the analysis of spaces and bodies. This volume introduces the issue of the human body, especially in the chapter by Kim Knott, who comments correctly that ‘The centrality of the body for social life and the cultural order was recognized in different ways by Lefebvre and Foucault’ (p. 40) and in the chapter by Trygve Wyller on ‘The Undocumented Embodied’. Knott (2005) has previously published an influential work on place and religion. Foucault is clearly relevant to this particular debate on intertwinement between religion and place, given his notion of the body as the site where the local and global exercise of power coincides. In some respects, the ‘turn to the body’ has followed the ‘turn to religion’ and thus in terms of the theme of crisis perhaps the real problems of secular society and the churches lie in the body as a site of public dispute and conflict. Pope Francis has warned Catholics about an obsession with the body and sexuality, but it will not go away. In my own work on ‘regulating bodies’, I defined a ‘somatic society’ as ‘a social system in which the body.…is the principal field of political and cultural activity. The body is the means by which the tensions and crises of society are thematized’ (Turner, 1992: 12). In that publication, I was thinking of many of the medical issues in the late 1980s and 1990s around sexually transmitted diseases, and the HIV/AIDs crisis, and around anorexia and bulimia. In an earlier period, masturbatory insanity captured many parental anxieties about the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today in the religious field we have a somatic society that is defined around such issues as female bishops, circumcision, same-sex marriage, stem cell research, abortion, adoption, homosexuality, foetal surgery, the age of consent, longevity, and transplants. Perhaps the next stage in the post-secularism debate is post-humanism –also referred to as trans-humanism. It is in this context of the impact of technology on the body that issues about space, embodiment and religion become really critical. With new developments in biotechnology, the quest for ‘human enhancement’ and the drive towards prolongevity are now underpinned by massive economic investments. The human body may change radically, for example, by ‘xenotransplantation’ as science opens up the possibility of ‘horizontal gene transfers’ (Fuller, 2011: 68). This biotech revolution presents a serious challenge to traditional theological notions about humanity and brings into question the biblical premise that men and women were created (or entwined) in ‘the image of God’.
Finally, having organized this review around various sites of crisis, it is time to examine ‘intertwinement’ as part description and part metaphor for church–state connections. ‘Intertwinement’ as a metaphor is taken from the practice of weaving threads or twine together to form a functional garment, that is pleasing to the eye and to touch. The result is a harmonious unity, but most of the examples in this review are about social and cultural elements that do not comfortably hang together and whose connection often results in friction and disharmony. The secular and the sacred collide in graveyards, in hospitals, in places where people seek refuge and asylum, in the interface between secular law and religious values. As a result, I suggest ‘entanglement’ as a more appropriate description and metaphor to suggest relationships, sites and values that are in a tangle. The post-secular tangle is one of endless dispute about the secular and the sacred, especially over the body, in terms of abortion, circumcision, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. On these issues there is little evidence of any emerging Rawlsian overlapping consensus and hence civil society appears to be deeply divided over fundamental values. Here we have a tangle of jarring positions between the secular and the sacred, and hence the question mark in the title of this volume is clearly appropriate.