Interview: Graham Ward

Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford. Alongside John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Graham is one of the founders of the Radical Orthodoxy movement in theology, which takes a critical stance towards modernity. Graham is the author of numerous seminal texts on language, postmodernism and gender studies. He is in the process of developing a "culturally engaged systematic theology".

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

I have to do this several times in fact. I'm often asked to comment upon where religion, the study of religion, is today, and so what I tend to do is to give them a context to show where it is not if you like, because the context has really changed. It seems to me it's changed at least since the late 1980s.

It’s the kind of change that's picked up in the European Survey particularly with respect to the increase in a number of younger generation, younger adults, who are believing in some notion of the divinity that tends to be pantheist, pantheistic world spirits, but also in the afterlife. And I think that comes through a number of cultural phenomena: in videos like Ellie Goulding's for example or some of the Lana Del Rey song videos which actually feature the afterlife. The afterlife seems to be quite a key feature of contemporary culture and popular culture. So I think that from that time what you've got is that what can be called the new visibility of religion. It's not translating itself necessarily into conversions, particularly in the European context. It's not to do with people returning to the church in droves.

But it is partly do to with the way in which international political scene is becoming increasingly involved through radicalisation - Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – with religious matters. That new visibility emerged at the same time as a couple of terms started to appear within the sociology, cultural theory; one of them being postsecular. We might want to come back to that. Another of them is re-enchantment. So I think that the new visibility attests to the ways in which religion is now in the public sphere. It's not just simply to do with newspapers recounting the manoeuvres of ISIS, or actually Jewish Hasidic communities protesting that they're under threat.

Christian fundamentalist, particularly black African Pentecostal churches around the M25, are on the ascendant. Obviously there's a real kind of drive when you've got 9/11 or the London bombing, or the Paris shooting last week, all helps to publicise the new phase if you like for religion. But in fact, what interests me also is the way this new visibility is also getting into the mainstream of popular culture in various ways. And that too is then making that visibility all the more apparent, although in much more subtle, metaphorical, methodological ways. Often, there's talk about the return of mythic thinking because of a real sense of investment in mythologies again and strong imagery. In fact I'm running a seminar here this year at the moment that is trying to examine the power of myth to mobilise and not necessarily the aesthetic power of myth, but the emotional power of myth in the formation of emotional communities, and the ways in which people identify, play out these kind of mythic realities. Be it Doctor Who weekends, or the Harry Potter industry here in Christ Church. I want to characterise the new visibility as not only a social and political phenomena but a cultural phenomena as well that's really quite pervasive at the moment.

Perhaps to pick up those two terms that you flagged up. The postsecular and re-enchantment. Just wondered whether you could briefly give a definition of those two terms and indeed, are they symbiotically related in some way, is there a relationship between the postsecular and re-enchantment and if so, what?

These aren't easy questions. I don't on the whole now tend to use the word postsecular and I've criticised it quite a lot. They're cultural, social categories. ‘Post’ doesn't do anything. It's defining something that's after. But it's not very descriptive. It's not particularly forensic or analytical in what it can do for us.

My sense is that we have to relate this back, if it's going to have any content, to two phenomena. The attacks upon the secularisation thesis in which the European Survey of Values shows as an upward trend rather than a downward trend as one would predict. Attacked by any number of sociologists, including people like Peter Berger who had quite an investment in the secularisation thesis. There are one or two who want to keep it going like Steve Bruce. I mean all the work that's been done recently by Grace Davie or Linda Woodhead, it's all pointing to the fact that we can't talk about a secularisation. It's fragmenting the concept if you like. The same way that modernity is fragmenting as a concept.

Now historians are talking about multiple modernities. After Charles Taylor's A Secular Age we are now talking about a variety of secularisations and secularisms. So I think there's been a shift within the academy. The academy is analysing cultural and social phenomena and they're just saying that the predictions of the secularisation thesis haven't happened, and that Europe is no longer the exception as it was before. It's no longer the paradigm as worldwide trends are showing. There's a kind of move away from that, and the postsecular is labelling phenomena that they think is being picked up by this critique of the secularisation thesis. I think that on top of that, and related to secularism rather than the secularisation thesis, secularism is emerging increasingly as a state sponsored ideology. And I think that this is partly the French led the way on this with the resurgence of interest in laïcité as a policy following 9/11. They made all these recommendations about public representation and religious symbols.

But in fact what France was doing is now happening increasingly across Europe, where secularism is being used by the state as a form of accommodation. In other words, if you are French, this is the kind of French people we are looking for. And I think it's got caught up within a very strong move away from multiculturalism as the state policy, towards accommodationism. You see this in France, Holland, Germany, and you know when you've got David Cameron actually saying that multicultural is a botched project, you're already getting the beginnings of this in this country. What do nation states do to establish a sense of national identity, belonging, citizenship? That move is being criticised increasingly as being ideological. And what is interesting is what is happening now in France under the auspices of laïcité, with regards to the way they're publicly presenting Islam, and the way that they're actually publicly present Judaism as well, because of the shootings in the kosher supermarket. Even in France now what they want is to show people is the public face of Islam, of Judaism. But laïcité is all about expunging that face from the public sphere. It'll be interesting to see where that goes. That's what I would say about the postsecular. It doesn't do anything. There's two phenomena which are recurring which is one, the critique, because of the empirical data that is emerging of the secularisation thesis, and because of the way in which secularism as an ideology is under critique and being exposed as a little state sponsored ideology.

Enchantment is different. I think they are related but they are related in a complex ways. People using the enchantment term tend to be the cultural theorists rather than the sociologists. So it tends to be much more a cultural category employed in cultural theory than in sociological analysis. And I think what enchantment points to is the rise of telecommunications with the internet and facebook and the way in which computer graphics are increasingly becoming box office hits in cinema, and in some way, creating more liquid senses of reality. And so the kind of culture that's emerging is reflecting that. The Transformer film series is indicative. Any object from a toaster to a mobile phone can suddenly turn into a something like a weapon or whatever.

It's that kind of notion. I always link it to the two really huge series, the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series. Because in C. S. Lewis you walk through the wardrobe to get Narnia. But you don't in the Harry Potter series. The magic there is actually quite aligned with the social realities of what's going on, including a meeting with the prime minister at one point and departures from King's Cross etc. As for the Twilight series, well you don't meet these vampires flying through the window any more, you meet them in the school car park and they can quite happily survive through the day and meld with the rest of the high school. These cultural artefacts are wanting to make reality itself more plastic.

What I find interesting about this is that this concept did begin in social theory with Weber. And what Weber was pointing to was the process of industrialisation, instrumental reason, and the rise of technology, and what's ironic here is that re-enchantment is being driven by the technological, it's technology that's actually delivering to us these kind of morphing worlds all the time. So you can actually be sitting on a bus or whatever, and get your ipad out, tune into a film, enter into another different realm. I think the re-enchantment that is happening then is also being picked up by the scientific world itself. Because the scientific world at the advanced level is actually preoccupied with notions of molecular biology where they talk emergence. That is nothing is really as stable as it appears. And notions of multiverses.

I mean I read a book the other day that is trying to talk about religion and multiverses. An American academic. So even within the hard sciences now there is a kind of sense that reality is not really there the way you think it is. It's just the way we are created or have evolved to be able to perceive it in these ways and construct it in these ways, but it's not really there in any shape or form at any level that we are now investigating.

Thank you very much indeed. Maybe moving on now to the third question. Where is this debate going to go in the next five to ten years do you think?

That would be interesting. I've already highlighted the way in which I don't think accommodationism is going to work. And so state sponsored ideologies are not going to work. Now one of the terms that's being bandied around and actually Rowan Williams sometimes uses is, procedural secularism which is basically I am equal before the law, and it has this democratic political notion of equality before state institutions.

I think that's increasingly going to come under pressure. One, because using secular there is in fact a category mistake. We're not talking about secular as such. It's a political concept about equality. There is nothing necessarily secular about that. So I think we're going to see that religion is going to increase in the public sphere, certainly within the foreseeable futures. I cannot see that we're going to get beyond that. And what I think is going to happen is that we're increasingly going to see that whatever we thought, the secular was a historical blip.

And you know, there is a lot of historians now working on this in Britain who say look, this is a 1960s phenomena that appeared at the same time sociologists were pressing the secularisation thesis, and even then there were sociologists who were actually questioning whether there was such a process going on. Callum Brown, for example, or Hugh Macloed. All these are suggest, if secularisation happened dramatically at all, it happened in the 1960s. But the extent to which religion was not part of the public sphere I think is under question and we've got historians that I know of here who are examining if and when this happened. Religion is not being picked up by the press in the same way perhaps as now.

It doesn't get picked up until round about 1973, and suddenly you've got the politicisation of Islam, the Salman Rushdie affair later and religion is back on the public agenda again. So there's a kind of question as to the extent to which secularism was a myth we bought into. So I think we're increasingly going to come to a recognition that secularism was never there and we are therefore going to have to deal with it, like America deals with it. So for an American, if one Jewish person wants to bring another Jewish person to court, there are separate religious courts that can be set up whose decisions are then upheld by the state. And I think it may well occur that we too in Europe have to rethink along those lines.

If we are going to recognise that religious identity is a fundamental part of human identity, then we are going to have to accommodate that within state policies and not talk about secular procedures and the rest. We're already getting conflicts between Sharia law and common law, between canon law, Jewish law and Hindu law with common law. So we're going to have to face those conflicts. We've not done that because of this kind of ideology of secularism that's kept all of this at bay. But the more that goes, the more this will actually come out.

I often find that the resources for handling the way Europe will have to handle this are probably found in places like South Africa. And there is some of the really interesting work in religion and public theology going on there, at the University of the Western Cape. They're looking into this in relation to a larger question to do with human rights. This is only going to increase. It's going to have particular fronts upon it increases and I think that the foremost front will have be state policies, with legal and constitutional frameworks. International law also.

At the same time, we're getting a de-homogenisation of monolithic faiths. So we're recognising that Christianity is plural, and we're talking about world Christianities. I think what we're seeing increasing with Islam is revisions within the Islamic community that doesn't identify with forms of Islam that is Saudi Arabian or Pakistani. Islam in Indonesia, South Africa, France, it's not the same at all. So I think we're going to get increasing senses of the heterogeneity of these faith communities and that's going to then impact upon our understanding of secular globalisation. It's therefore going to impact international relations. There's still not enough work done on religion and international relations. Madeleine Albright, years and years ago, tried to instil that all potential diplomats in America should be trained in religion.

I often get NGOs approaching me for training for people on the ground about religion. And in fact, what I often tell them is that I can't be of much help in that way because you need local knowledges. I could tell you something about Islam, I could bring you somebody who is an expert, but they won't know about Islam in that particular area. There's going to be much more being worked out in international relations and in training of NGOs and potential diplomats with the local colouration of religion.

That's the difference between lived religion and religious studies. And we haven't got time to get into it but I suppose the worrying thing in terms of the analysis you're offering is that religious education still seems to be stuck at a very secular view of what religion is. So we're not actually equipping the younger generation to actually begin to think these things through. We're not giving the methodological or thematic frameworks to look at religion are we.

No we're not, and that is a shame. What is happening thankfully within some of the universities, Edinburgh for example is one, Birmingham has always had it, Cambridge is another. They are actually now employing lecturers in world Christianity or in Leeds for instance, in African Christianities. So that we are now introducing the students to the plurality of these monolithic faiths. I don't know whether that's happening in the same way about Islam.

I don't get the sense it's happening in the same way about Judaism either. So we're giving students a false picture of the ways in which these pieties actually work. To the point where there is still a question whether really we can do the work we want to do within universities anymore and in fact whether it really just needs to go on within those institutions which are training people for ministries. There’s a need to go out and experience this plurality. So, at Union Seminary in New York they have a programme that exposes potential ministers to different forms of the Christian faith; putting them into South Africa or other countries to get them to see that there are in fact radical differences here.

Is there anything that you want to say that we haven't covered so far in terms of the past, the present, the future, or metaphors and ideas. Are there some terms that we should be thinking about beyond the postsecular perhaps?

I'm not sure there are new terms that I'd like to plug in any way. I just want to point to two things that I really think are significant. And these two things are coming out of an analysis of the REF.

It's very clear from the REF submissions of the last five years is that the trend in Britain is towards liquidating the boundaries between philosophy, dogmatic theology, practical theology, biblical theology etc. All those sub-disciplines are melting into each other and people are moving quite fluently across all of them. So there's no kind of sense that there is any kind of hierarchy. There is much more flux and boundary crossing in what's going on.

And the other trend is that there was hardly any pure theology being done. A lot of theology now is interdisciplinary. A lot of work within the humanities, the way it is organised, the way it is done within larger frames of schools and faculties and divisions or whatever, they are multi, crossing all the humanities, so there is much more interdisciplinarity. These trends will only increase and one of the important trends I think is that there is no longer a distinction between religion and theology in the way that there was even ten years ago. So the idea of religion as a term that is ideological etc, that's just nonsense, it's just not working like that.