Interview: Craig Calhoun

Craig Calhoun is a Professor at, and the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Craig is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology of culture, communications, politics, philosophy and economics.

How do you characterise the present debate or dialogue concerning religion and the public sphere?

Muddled. I think the debate is extremely important. It's richer than it has been in a number of years with a variety of different voices and issues. But it is muddled because the concerns pull in different directions. So some of the debate about religion and the public sphere is ‘Should religious voices be there at all?’ Some of it is about particular religions.

And so there is in the UK and to some extent several other countries a heightened concern about Islam, and so instead of a discussion about religion and the public sphere, this becomes a discussion about Islam getting too big a voice in our country. And then it shades over into immigration and we get upsets about immigrants and them bringing different religions into our country. The core discussion of religion and the public sphere gets sidetracked into discussions about a particular religion and the reasons why it's appearing in the public sphere now, which can be independent to anything anyone has said in the voices of the public sphere.

Obviously, this isn't unique to now; in the 1840s it would have been the Catholic question. But it does mean that it's harder to have a discussion. The third issue is the prominence of a set of voices for atheism as a more or less focused alternative position in public debate. In addition to a secularist view of a public sphere as not dominated by any religion, there is now a presence of an actively organised atheist position that also influences these discussions. Independent of who is right and wrong in this, it is hard to stay on topic in these conversations about religion in the public sphere.

This question’s about terms or concepts. I guess one term that's used quite a lot is this idea that perhaps we've moved somehow from a secular to a postsecular public sphere. Just wondered if you've got any reflections on the idea of the postsecular, an idea you've written a lot about. And if perhaps that isn't necessarily the best conceptual framework we can use, is there another metaphor or idea out there that might do a better job?

I'll do my best. As you know my view is that post-secular isn't the best characterisation of our situation. I think that the idea comes to the fore because of the tendency to see the notion of the secular through a secularisation story i.e. the idea that there was a progressive decline of religion, a withdrawal of religion from different spheres of life.

This was very bound up with a certain idea of the modern and the notion that in modern societies religion will matter less. So in a certain sense those people who are not actually religious didn't have to think about religion in a way. What the term postsecular captures is more the change of view on the part of those who didn't think they had to know much about religion. That story of secularisation no longer applies. So it's not the case that religion had previously faded away. It's not that we were all secular and then suddenly became more religious, but that many people subscribed to a view in which religion mattered less and less and then with some surprise saw it matter more. And that's what got labelled postsecular. I think that there is a reality to this, it's just a bad term for it.

The reality is that in many places, including in particular in Europe, religion did matter less for some purposes and there was a decline in organised religious participation. So there was some truth to that. Religions still mattered a lot to many people and it mattered a lot in other places in the world, and it didn't fade away globally as predicted. Indeed most people would think of the United States as a modern society that continued to have a very high rate of organised religious participation.

So the issue isn't the general trend. It's specific comparisons; why Europe, why not the US, for religious decline? Why societies that had established churches saw more decline than places that didn't have established churches. That's a real question. The core feature of our predicament is that there is much more active participation in public affairs in the name of religious positions than there has been in some time. Secondly though, people have short historical memories. They think that this is a more radical change than it was.

They won’t remember back even as far as William Temple, and therefore they tend to have the idea, because of the secularisation story, that there has been for two hundred years nothing but withdrawal rather than ups and downs and different approaches. And times when public engagement came more from the religious left, and times when it came more from the religious right. My own view of this is that we live in a situation that has a new religious pluralism. And that's a better description, that it is a pluralism that includes both many different religious voices and active non-religious voices in debates and dialogue with religious voices.

Where is this debate going in the next five to ten years? Where are the new insights? I guess another way of framing it in light of what you've just said, do you think this is going to get more muddled in the next five to ten years, and if so, is there anything we can do about it, or is there anything that could shift that would allow the debate to get more clarity and more purchase?

I think there are a few things that we could become clearer about and that the broader public discussion can become clearer about, that would help, and there are issues on the agenda. One is that there could be greater clarity that religion is not automatically left-wing or right-wing or anywhere on a left right spectrum.

Therefore the particular positions that particular people are taking have to be examined rather than assumed. And I think that trying to map religion into a left-right political understanding is often itself very unhelpful. Secondly I think that the pinch point in your term, and issue that will hang up this conversation and already does, is immigration. And it's not going to go away as an issue. As we see around us, it is heightening as an issue. It entangles the public discussion of religion. And it is right now the more dominant public discussion. It's hard to escape but nonetheless trying to keep distinct the debate over migration and the debate over the growth of different religions and what different people have to say from religious positions seems to me important.

Third, there is a long-standing ebbing and flowing debate over science and religion that I think is likely to remain a challenging one to enter into where some people argue that science is radically distinct and opposed to religion. Other people argue that they're compatible. Other people argue for space that is not completely colonised by science in which to express things that science doesn't deal with well. Both terms, ‘science’ and ‘religion’, are so value laden and symbolise so many different things to people that this is an almost unresolvable debate.

I think what we can hope for in terms of clarifying it, is that there is no necessary and automatic answer to it, that it is not the case that either is simply a trump card to be played against the other. Fourth, I think that pluralism itself is a feature in this debate that is important and it has a component that is going to be more and more evident to us, which is that the various voices that participate don't fit neatly into boxes and will probably sit less and less neatly into boxes. In every religious tradition there are more different lay voices contending to be the representative of that tradition than before. There is dissent within Catholicism, there is dissent within the Church of England, there is dissent among Jews and so forth and so on through the range of religions.

The debate which sometimes says 'Oh, there's the Muslim position which says this' will have to be corrected to say there are a variety of different Muslim positions. There are of course Sunni and Shite positions, but even within those headline categories there is debate over the positions. This is healthy in my point of view, to break down those stereotype positions, but it's hard for those who are trying to understand what's going on in the conversation. And there's yet a further position which is the range of people who are articulating religious views that don't fit neatly into any particular brand name of organised religion.

These may be New Age voices, they may be people who combine elements of different positions; they come from a Christian background and think that religion has a lot to offer, and they integrate Buddhist thinking. There are a number of what I regard as quasi-religions like Scientology, there are voices of Jedi religion. I think that it is the nature of the conversation that what seemed to be the fixed boundaries of various positions are being exploded. Actually, I don't think that's a bad thing entirely, but it's a confusing thing.

That resonates with Charles Taylor's idea of the supernova. So would you also say very briefly as a kind of follow-up that there is a sort of breaking down of essential categories within the secular identity as well. I mean is the secular identity going through as many kinds of breaking down into further sub-groupings? Or is it more a phenomenon that you are associating with religions?

I think that all through modern societies, all through our contemporary societies, there is an openness to identity debates. This doesn't mean that there aren’t also people who are trying to close those down. But in secular lives we have lots of this debate and the reasons are partly that there are many more well educated and articulate people expressing different opinions.

So just as the clergy have less of a monopoly on the formation and expression of religious opinions, so too doctors have less of a monopoly on the expression and formation of medical opinions. You can go on the internet and debate. If you're a cancer sufferer, you can join up with other cancer sufferers and question what the doctor has said, or there is alternative therapy. In every area of life there is a proliferation of voices. When you say the secular, does the secular have this proliferation as well as religion. Yes, though it seems to me that the exact question of what we mean by the secular is important.

If we mean those people who are not religious, then yes, they have a variety of different identities. But I think that what we see is really that's not the most helpful meaning of secular. Secular also includes spheres of life in which religious people may defer to expertise that doesn't come from religion. So I just mentioned medicine.

Christian people happily to go Jewish doctors and defer to their expertise and don't assume that theology will settle the question of what's the best treatment for the disease is. What we see is that there is a large realm of people for whom identities are not settled fully by either being religious or by being secular. There are some people who are militantly attached to an identity like the atheist identity, and they may be as sectarian about being atheists as any religious actor.

There are others who are sceptical or who are humanists, but they're active humanists and that's a sort of ‘not religious’ identity that nonetheless does some of the same work as religion; organised meetings, and rituals and so forth. I think that there is a pluralisation in general in these things, and part of this pluralisation is the blurring of the boundaries between the religious and secular.

Thank you very much, Craig. The last question then really is, is there anything else you'd like to comment or reflect upon that wasn't already covered in this interview?

I'm going to guess you've heard enough but the one last thing that occurs to me is that I've used phrases like voices and spokespeople. It's worth noting that one of the really important features of our era is that the way in which people get authority as spokespeople is itself changing and fluctuating and in dispute. So it may be the obvious in terms of traditional grounds, the authority that the Archbishop of Canterbury has. But there are a variety of people who exceed those kinds of traditional categories in various ways. And this harkens back to earlier periods.

There was a great period in the late 18th and early 19th century in which there was a proliferation of a range of different religious voices in the UK, just to stick to this example. But it's something that poses an interesting challenge for religion in the public sphere which is, in effect, who do you treat as authoritative voices to bring into dialogue with each other? If you are hoping to get a better and clearer dialogue around this, it used to be where you knew the senior authority from most of the mainstream religions.

Think of the UK example of the prominence of Protestant, largely evangelical congregations that don't have any such hierarchical representative. If you go into the highly immigrant populations of English cities, you not only find quote 'alien religions', those people who have come, Hindu or Muslim; you will find lots of evangelical Protestant churches, often in shop fronts and other settings, that are not organised into a strong institutional structure that yields an authoritative spokesperson. This is a little bit the way it was with Baptists two hundred year ago, but it's something that means one of the biggest things happening under the religious landscape doesn't get noticed in the public discussion.