Interview: Jane Wills

Jane Wills is Professor of Human Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Over the past two decades her research has been on: (1) The changing geo-political-economy of work, employment, labour supply and labour politics; (2) New forms of urban political alliances with a particular interest in community organising and, more recently; (3) The politics and practice of localism in the UK. 

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

I've come to these questions through practice. So I've been looking at the ways in which new forms of political practice are developing in the city. Since 2001 looking at the living wage campaign and getting more and more involved in community organising, and then trying to understand the broad based community coalition behind what is becoming a political movement. And that has then taken me to the question of faith. Because in poor inner city areas it's often religious organisations that are the most significant in terms of local community. Religious organisations have buildings, they have people, they have congregations of people in relationship with each other. They may have money. They certainly have leadership and talent. So if you're going to do something political, communities organising themselves to find a voice to make change, faith is absolutely essential. Because there is very little left of anything else. So there are sports clubs, youth clubs, very patchy trade union and political party organisation, but they're all very weak and they're not the ground. So faith is really essential. The other thing that you can work with of course is schools, but schools are kind of partly state organisations, and universities, and that makes them tricky. Faith organisations have their own traditions, independence, set of values, so they're incredibly powerful in relation to trying to get people to engage in politics.

So that's a back-door way in to thinking about the relationship to religion and the public sphere, because traditionally religion has been seen as not part of the public sphere, certainly not in a secular society. And it's been marginalised, particularly in academia people are incredibly dismissive about religion having any positive role to play in the public sphere at all. But what's interesting is the way that practice has put religion back on the agenda in relation to the public sphere, and that then takes you to more academic debates about how you think about that and post-secularism is a way in which you can think of religion coming in dialogue with non-religious organisation over shared interests, which is exactly what something like community organising does.

An obvious question to ask that may be a more complex question to answer is what do you think has contributed to this new visibility or new interest in the role of religion in the public sphere from your own particular disciplinary perspective?

I'd say two things. One is that as I've said before, nothing else is standing. There's a vacuum on the left in particular.

Do you mean almost intellectually as well as physically?

No intellectually, in universities, there is a very strong discourse, particularly human geography which is very leftist and very much about the problems of capitalism, and about the need for social movements. David Harvey is one of our leading thinkers who would say we need a socialist revolution, that the working class will inherit the world. And that is sort of the sub-current within geography. And the elite running most of our institutions still sticks to a rather secular narrative around multiculturalism, free-markets, open borders, and it is largely anti-faith.

But the only thing standing in terms of practical politics is what I was talking about: the left used to fill a big space when I was growing up. You could change the world through left politics. It's now much harder to do it through the secular political tradition. It's been defeated time and time again. And so religion stands out more because there's a kind of vacuum all around, and it stands out not just because it's there but also because it has a strong value base, and it offers people something, an anti-materialist analysis of the world in terms of having a good life, a community, solidarity. So it's some of the space the left used to fill.

The other reason is that religion is growing. It's not just that everything else has died, there is real growth, and that's partly to do with immigration so that people are moving to the city with religious traditions, and they're taking their religious organisations and growing them. But it's also the fact that proselytising to an extent is then also working, particularly in Islam, those institutions are growing not just through immigration but through the activities that they're offering. And some evangelical churches too. They're offering something that people want, and that's another reason.

You talked about immigration and migration as being a kind of growth impetus for religion. Is writing particularly about the urban also contributing? What I'm thinking about is that under classic secularisation theory, I'm thinking of the secular city Harvey Cox and so on from a theological perspective, the city was seen as a kind of symbol of modernisation, modernity, technological advance, certainly, in the early twentieth century it looked like religion would become more privatised as the world became more urbanised.

Obviously, in the twenty-first century, that's not an analysis that stands up to scrutiny at all. I was wondering whether you've thought about any other processes involved with the urban in terms of materiality and space against all expectations, encouraging the growth of religion as a practice but also as a kind of discourse.

There is something about the sheer concentration of people that allows you to stay in strong institutions. When I looked at some evangelical churches quite near here that are growing, I think partly the fact that they are in the city allows them to grow, because they are able to tap social networks and people can travel quite far. And if you're in a rural area that would be much harder to plant a church and see it grow. So people travelling and building networks.

Then of course there's also a sense of social need and solidarity which is part of the experience, certainly in the global South where people don't earn enough to live, which means they absolutely need social solidarity to live and make a life. That's true to an extent in the UK too. So people need a place where they can be sustained on their own terms without money. Again, in the city is possible to sustain those kind of organisations and build them around those people which again in another part of the country, with another sort of geography, that would be more difficult.

Is there an issue of scale though because I guess London clearly is a very vigorous space for new religions, and old religions have become re-invigorated through migrations. I'm wondering about cities such as Manchester or Liverpool, big cities but not necessarily global cities. My sense is that it's less hard to detect going on, but I don't know whether that's my lack of knowledge or whether there is something here about scale between global cities and large cities.

The migration factor is so much more intense in the global city. That's part of it. Somewhere like Nottingham, and I've only looked at this very superficially, but if you look at the community organisations there, faith is still playing a very central role. However, the religious organisations that are there aren't necessarily that strong and certainly look after their own. But it's necessary to engage with others. So minority communities for instance in cities like Nottingham or Mansfield or Leeds would have felt more isolated I think than they do in a big global city like London where everybody is different.

So there's quite a need for having an alliance that allows them to make friends with other faiths and other people in a safe way which wasn't available before. Again, to do that kind of trans-faith solidarity building, which again you can't do in a really small or less populated area, there is something about spatial concentration, ease of transport, social mix, and those kinds of differences. It's interesting, we tend to think of cities as being secular and that poor people from the rural areas came into the cities during industrialisation, but there are all sorts of evangelising everywhere.

I suppose historically Methodism and the non-conformists had relative success if you like in mixing with the proletariat. But then in middle to late 19th century and through to the 20th century those huge churches were being built on the expectation that that would be sustained and it wasn't. Something tells me that's not going to happen this time, i.e. as globalisation and urbanisation intensifies, it doesn't seem to me that we're going to see the same peak and then decline. This feels like it's going to be something that's ongoing, but I don't know whether we're lurching into the next question here. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Well there is a question about population movement isn't there? Religion has been growing in cities like London because of immigration and the decline before was because people were moving up in the social hierarchy, they didn't need religion as much and religions didn't proselytise as much, so there's something about that kind of effect of social disruption. It’s all the Chicago school [of sociology], this mass movement of people into the cities rips up social organisation, and then people need to re-build their organisation to stabilise. Often they did that through religion but not always. And as they became more prosperous they dropped some of those traditions. Maybe that's part of it. It's also important to look at what religion does, whether it reaches out to people and what it does in the modern age.

Where do you see this debate going in the next five to ten years? You've sort of intimated in your response that a lot of the re-emergence of religion and interest in religion is driven by practice, people practising religion in outward ways. Is that how you see the next five to ten years? What do you think is going to happen?

Well, I really don't know but I suppose there is no sign of the trend reversing in terms of increased rates of mobility, migration and inequality. And the shake-up in our political systems of thought that seems to be ongoing too. The crisis in our political parties - the sense that there is a real sense of uncertainty about politics and I don't think that any of those things are really changing in the short term. That means there is actually a huge role for faith to play because there is that sense of long term tradition that's got something to say. Archbishop Welby seems to be doing a good job. There is real scope for leadership.

I suppose one question would be, if this is an organic re-politicisation through religious practice and imaginaries for want of a better word, does this become more institutionalised or does it remain something that's parallel and complementary to the existing political systems?

Whether it becomes institutionalised in some sense of filling the gap of the state, I'm not so sure.

I suppose one way to ask this question would be where do you see CitizensUK in five to ten years, because that's obviously a highly effective network now that's generating huge amounts of work and making political inroads in key social issues. Does this become a kind of possible future framework for their relationship between religion and public sphere?  

I think it has potential to be successful anywhere really. As long as you had a large enough population and significant numbers of civil society organisations. It has lots of weaknesses as well because it relies on existing organisation and that's not doing anything to people that do not belong. It requires institutions, secular and religious, to recruit, to build, to grow, and if that doesn't happen, you've got no way of putting this model of politics on top. So it's a kind of shortcut to political activity but that ultimately relies on face to face relationships in institutions. So in that sense politics has to have an institutional base to be successful and that requires religious groups, trade unions, community groups, universities, whatever to be able to build relationships between people and mobilise them around politics. If you can do that you can do it anywhere.

Another way to ask the question is do you see those mechanisms for building up trust and understanding between those different sectors as continuing in the next five to ten years, or do you think that will come to an end?

I think there is a real craft to it. I don't think it's easy work to do. I think we need to pay much more attention to the labour of making these relationships because it's really important. People do have a lot in common with each other but they need to feel that they are being taken on a journey that's safe for them and is going to be managed, and they're clear about what they're getting into, and that is quite skilled and you need a big network of organisations behind it.

CitizensUK often feels fragile because the funding is very weak. It's quite hard to maintain it on top of all these organisations and no one really takes ownership or cares about it enough, then the budget is never there and it works on a shoe-string. We could pay more attention to that model of politics, the labour involved in building relationships, and take it more seriously, then we could do tremendous things. But it's in no way automatic.

We've probably come to the last question. Is there anything else you'd like to comment or reflect upon that we haven't covered in this interview so far?

I do notice that there is this big gap which I was trying to get to earlier, about the elite and the ordinary person. I see that a lot with our students. A lot of our students would identify as religious, they would thank God in their abstracts or acknowledgements in their dissertation. The academic staff, the people running the universities have no understanding of that, no appreciation of it. And I think all our institutions are quite similar. There is this huge gap between the elite and ordinary people. And UKIP's capitalising on that quite successfully.

How might the gap be closed do you think? Because I suppose this is about religious literacy at one level, although of course they're not illiterate about religion intellectually are they?

Well, some of them are of course. Some people never encounter religion at all.

But they would have had to encounter religion presumably as a set of ideas and principles against which they position themselves?

My kids, my daughter is 16, most of her friends have never been to a church, there is no religion at school, they have no idea what Christmas is about, they have never sung a carol or a hymn, they have absolutely no idea what Christianity is - other than being rude about it because their parents are rude about it. There is a massive gap. I inherited religion from my parents but people are not doing that anymore. And it's odd because in a sense we're saying that religion is quite vibrant in cities. In other parts of the population, this is what's happening whereby you're not reaching these people who feel alienated. They're left out of this model.