Interview: Gordon Lynch

Gordon Lynch is Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent. Gordon's research 'focuses on meanings and values that shape contemporary life, whether these take conventionally religious forms or not'.‌

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

One thing that strikes me is the way in which religious traditions tend to be treated as if they were relatively autonomous as cultural-linguistic systems of meaning. You've got these different religious traditions, each with their different ways of engaging with the public sphere, and each of them can be treated as relatively distinct phenomena. And I think that tends to overlook common patterns of meaning across them. That's where the ideas of the sacred in relation to religion are quite useful. Particularly in terms of morally-charged symbols that cut across a range of religious or secular traditions.

So picking up on that idea of the symbolic meaning then, so you're saying perhaps it's more important to move on from structures of belief to structures of meaning as mediated through symbolic means. Is that just your thinking about how it should go or is that your sense in which society is generally going?

I think it's a mixture of both really. I think the debates generated by some of the new atheists in relation to religion I find arid really because they seem to me to operate at a fairly rudimentary level about the nature of religious truth claims. That’s essentially a philosophical and theological debate. In terms of how societies operate I think we need to pay more attention to morally-charged meanings that circulate through cultural, for example through public and social media. Some of those meanings will draw sharp distinctions between basic moral assumptions taken to be at the heart of decent social life, and that which threatens to pollute those basic moral realities – what we can think of in terms of the sacred and the profane. For me, some of the most interesting questions are about what has become sacralised in this sense in the modern world, which is not the same as the beliefs espoused by different religious or non-religious traditions.

Would you have any particular case studies or examples that you can think of of these kind of symbolic spaces and meanings that are around in today's public space that fulfil that function?

I’d argue that from the eighteenth century onwards, we have seen humanitarianism and nationalism become increasingly influential sacred forms across modern societies. Those sacred forms take complex patterns of relationship to each, sometimes in opposition to each other, sometimes woven together (as in the case of Bellah’s notion of American civil religion). We can see these both in contemporary humanitarian initiatives and in the resurgence of nationalism across a number of different countries. These continue to circulate and evolve and adapt, but they continue to be major sacred forms around which public life is at least sporadically structured.

Where would diversity fit into all this. Is it more difficult do you think to find these symbolic tropes in an increasingly pluralised society?

I think it can be interesting to think about how some of these sacred forms recur across different political or cultural positions. For example, an excellent recent study of student activism in relation to the Middle East conflict at British universities showed how supporters of Palestine or Israel would rarely use specific religious traditions to make their claims but more broadly shared moral claims around humanitarianism and human rights. Language around human rights or humanitarian concern therefore becomes a commonly shared language despite that diversity. And actually what was being fought over was actually how you interpret humanitarian moral values in relation to that case and which ‘side’ had the better claim to them.

Do you have any sense of what public policy could do to make more of these understandings? Do you see public policy as currently expressed working with the grain of this kind of thinking or against it?

I think we generally lack a public language of the sacred, by which I mean we don’t yet have an effective way of talking publicly about that which is taken to be sacred in contemporary society, beyond religious or non-religious beliefs. I don't think that we are at a point where the tools are there to have a public debate about the sacred forms that are influential in society or how they change over time, or perhaps even more importantly what their shadow side is and what kind of harm is caused in their name. I think partly because the debate is so much framed around the place of religion in contemporary society and whether we are becoming a more secular society, it actually neglects a wider critical thinking about important moral meanings that cut across these binaries.

Do you see the media and popular culture as helping to promote a dialogue across traditions through the use of a symbolic narrative? I guess it does implicitly all the time, but are you aware of it having any impact in this debate at all?

I think it could be argued that the media are now a more important source of shared moral emotion than traditional religious organisations. Watching charity fund-raisers, national memorial events, or stories of child abuse can draw viewers into a very powerful, and unreflective, sense of moral community. But on the whole, people within media now are very resistant to thinking about their role in that, because they like to think of themselves of giving objective accounts of the world and are very resistant to seeing moral assumptions embedded in their work.

Where do you think this debate is going to go in the next five to ten years around the role and significance of religion in public life?

If anything it's not going to change very much. We’re still at a very early stage of working through the implications of a breakdown of the social consensus that British society is essentially Anglican, and that there is now no single religious or non-religious position that has a privileged status in British public life. Obviously the structures of Anglican influence still run deep, but culturally, in terms of people’s wider beliefs and identities, I think that influence is much weaker and raises fundamental questions about what role religion really should play in public life. In may take decades to resolve those, but with the religious landscape of Britain changing as successive generations become less engaged with traditional religious institutions. This is partly why, in the midst of all this change, we learn to develop a public language that can name and help us to reflect on the moral meanings that do shape public life today. For although we may be moving towards an increasingly secular society, we’re not moving towards one in which the sacred and the profane (in whatever form) no longer have any relevance.