Interview: David Martin

David Martin, a sociologist of religion known especially for his critique of secularization as a theory of social process and his pioneering work on Pentecostalism in Latin America, is a professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and honorary professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University. He is also an ordained priest in the Church of England attached as a non-stipendiary assistant to Guildford Cathedral.

Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed, David. We appreciate it. Can we start by thinking about how you characterise the present debate/dialogue concerning religion and the public sphere?

Well, it’s very difficult to know where to start, except to say that something is definitely changing again. For example, in English Literature, I’ve noticed people starting to talk about religion, for example Stephen Prickett is very well known now for his work on secularity and changes in the nineteenth century, in which he quotes for example Parsons, and refers to the Bible, the Church and so on.

I’ve been very reflective in recent months and years about my own position as a researcher in this area. I want to distinguish between what happen to be my interests and what is in fact broadly interesting! Obviously, religion and violence currently stand out. Karen Armstrong did  ‘Start the Week’ on this (BBC Radio 4 discussion programme) and the discussion (apart from her) was full of assumptions about the nature of religion and violence. Armstrong pointed out that violence also occurs in nationalism and other ideologies, for example, to which the presenter’s response was ‘that proves the point’. The point was that the whole discussion was predicated on a functionalist assumption and interpretation of religion. No other lens was even postulated – not even imagined. Where was the discussion of religion as identity and experience?

Another feature of the landscape is the fact that the sociology of religion has such a limited academic and public profile, despite so many people in both spheres talking about religion, usually ill-informedly and largely without method or system. Our debates about religion happen within the community of sociology of religion. This is all very interesting, but who are we talking to? It results in a lack of analytical frameworks within which the commentariat can engage in this. They’ve no idea what the questions should be. This hasn’t changed, but the interest in religion has. It highlights the absence of any quality of debate.

The thing is that religion has always been there, but in the last century or so just not talked about much. Even in countries where it was suppressed, this just meant that it was there anyway.

The other great feature is changing meanings of secularism. I had thought of this as a particular kind of ideology (and secularization as a process). But then secularism shifted to meaning the exclusion of religion from public debate. It’s useful and popular because the commentariat wants a shorthand. And then at more sophisticated levels in the discussion, even quality, supposedly informed newspapers such as The Tablet won’t handle ideas like ‘the other’.

This is all consolidated by the fact that sociology of religion doesn’t really engage with sociology, and vice-versa. It’s tucked away in a corner in every sense, and then other educated people can’t cope with it, let alone the broad public. I sometimes read some of the blog posts and the responses to them and they’re almost always absolutely absurd – the degeneration of comment in to abuse, often. My question is, how broadly do these sorts of questions go? And how much does it overflow in to the wider consciousness, but without the animus? I’m talking about a shift from the supposition that we are in a generalized was friendly to a generally friendly god, towards a harsher automatic reaction.

Where is this debate going to go in the next 5 – 10 years? Where are the pinch-points and where are the new insights?

This depends on what happens to RE in schools. My grandson gave a banal and appalling account of RE which I found difficult to believe. He said they’d learned off the 8-fold path and the 10 Commandments and that got an A. The fundamental narratives had been submerged in a kind of handbook of the teachings of the great world faiths, eg that Roman Catholics don’t like abortion and euthanasia and you just need to know that. I asked my grandson what would happen if you said that most Roman Catholics don’t believe that and he said ‘you’d fail’. Likewise, Shakespeare. I gather school children are using modern translations because the ideas and language are too challenging. They don’t turn to the plays themselves. So in religion – we learn some formulae, at best, and then think we can apply them everywhere. I don’t know how you can talk about religion without talking about stories and narratives. For example, somebody I know thought that the New Testament was written about 400 years after Jesus and uses this as evidence that it is make believe rather than a world of deep and serious criticism and thought.

If I were teaching it, I would start with how stories are embodied in rituals – how the year is organized calendrically and narratives are recycled in ritual time, year after year. Ceremony is recollection and memory and these are the spaces in which religions are lived. The elements of performance go alongside what people have in their heads. Religions are not rule books for living. They are themselves lived. For example, what people think they’re doing when the pray varies. Some think of it as an insurance; others as intervention in empirical experience. RE might look, for example, at inchoate notions of providence, rather than try to set out ‘facts’ about world religions.

It might also seek to explore what people do when they enact the story, eg in the Christian Eucharist – as a way of talking about how people live their beliefs. What do they think is happening? Why do they do it? The range of religious performances that people don’t know about is amazing. It’s not taught, or shared, or broadcast except occasionally as something exotic somebody has stumbled across. Then the performance is presented with some pat ‘facts’ about what is ‘believed’.

The media are differentially ignorant of this incredible richness, for example the Today programme (BBC Radio 4 morning news programme) expressed amazement recently that President Putin had had gone to church at Easter. They apparently had no idea how Orthodoxy has been reincorporated in to structures of governance – instead, amazement that this nasty man had gone to church.

How would you go about teaching the informal, where there may be little or no narrative or performance, as such?

It is interesting to think what spirituality does as well as being somehow a condition. There is certainly lots of festival-going and mystical experience going on, in which it is possible to detect elements of pilgrammage, for example. But I think of spirituality as an evanescent state of mind, and as a feature in the landscape, I think it is rather overdone. To emerge as religion it needs moral, ritual, performance and an overall framework of meaning: a narrative.

The other big idea of course is the post-secular, and I don’t believe in this idea. I have run in to very sophisticated discussions on Habermas, about the extent to which religion can be back in the public discussion, and I have found these to be intrusions by philosophy in to sociology. Habermas didn’t notice religion until it was a problem, and this has contributed to this idea that you can ignore Christians but you need to think about Muslims. What about all the religion and belief which is already there anyway, and always has been? An honest intellectual engagement with that would not be anything like so grossly normative. Without Habermas, sociology and sociology of religion would be less confused.

There is another debate making use of the term ‘post secular’ to describe those places where religion had been suppressed  and now isn’t. So they are thought of as ‘it was secular and now it’s not’.  There has been a shift anyway to using ‘post secular’ to mean ‘less secular countries’ and/or ‘religion has become a nuisance’. At least it has reopened a space for the sociology of religion to have a salience, but it needs rescuing. Confrontation is not needed. Engagement is.