Interview: Kim Knott

K‌im Knott is a Professor of Religious and Secular Studies at Lancaster University. Kim has developed a spatial methodology for contextualising religion, examining its engagement with other social and cultural institutions and issues, and for "breaking open the secular", which she has used to examine religious and secular beliefs and values in diverse locations. 

How would you characterise the present debate concerning religion in the public sphere?

It’s in good health, and that’s been developing over the last couple of decades. Even though the discourse of impact and public engagement and working collaboratively with stakeholders, that kind of university discourse, which is also the language of the research councils, even though that’s really come onto the agenda within the last ten years, I think the study of religions was already fairly well engaged in that process. We didn’t have a coherent way of talking about these things, but I think quite a lot of people were already engaged beyond their academic debates. They were engaged with certain kinds of public actors: the churches and other religious bodies, and to some extent experimenting with other agencies.

So when I first started work in the 1970s, we founded the Community Religions Project at the University of Leeds, and one of the stipulations of that project was to look for opportunities to work with interested public actors. I don’t know if we used the stakeholder word but we may very well have used a word like it. We had in mind particularly educationalists, but also the police and local community relations councils. And we did work for the local council, for the West Yorkshire Prison Service, the Home Office. And I think the impact results of REF 2014 will show that in the study of religion there has been a long standing engagement, working outwards into these areas.

I know that’s not the same as policy per se, but these are all really good developments.  And they were partly about identifying areas where the study of religion and policy makers might have common interests. For example since the legislation change around equality and discrimination, from the earliest working directives right through to the 2010 legislation, some scholars were engaged because it was quite obvious that public sector bodies didn’t know anything about religion. And it wasn’t just those bodies which really needed to know for the development of local and national policy, but also every workplace that needed an understanding of religious diversity. So there’s been that gradual awareness of what we now call religious literacy. And we did our first named work on that in the early 2000s. And that’s laid the ground for more recent and direct developments.

So what’s the underlying assumption behind this gradual coming together? What’s it expressing about the relationship between religion and the public sphere? For example is it a loosening of the narrow idea of a secular public space? What’s it telling us that’s going on at the deeper social and cultural level?

Well before I try to answer that, it’s partly an expression about what we understand by research.  It’s an expression of what we think the purpose of research is. Is research something that’s there to be useful, or is it something that’s done in and of itself for theoretical advances? There are many in the study of religion who think that research should be engaged. So there has been a shift in our attitude concerning who and what research should be for.

But on the other side there definitely has been a shift in the boundary between the secular state and religion, but I don’t think the positioning of that boundary is yet very clear. There has also been a pragmatic opening up. So many public bodies now need the research that we can do. There was a time when, just as the functions of religion were carried out by the secular state, so a lot of the functions of university research were carried out by other agencies and institutions. Although there is still some research going on elsewhere, there has been greater recognition, partly because of the role of the research councils, that university research can be useful and applied. So policy agencies have really caught onto that and realised that they don’t have the money to do that kind of thing, whereas universities do. So there is a pragmatic side to the opening up of that boundary; it’s not all just about a greater understanding on the scholarly or policy side about the relationship between religion and the state. I don’t know if that is any clearer than it was.

Has this shift taken place because of a resurgence of religion? Is it because religion has re-emerged or is it because it is newly visible? 

I’m of the newly visible camp. As a scholar I’ve spent decades trying to be heard not just in the wider world, but even more so in the secular academy, the antireligious academy. This never meant religion wasn’t there, wasn’t being studied or wasn’t important, but rather that no one was paying attention. This doesn’t mean there has been no process of secularisation. But now, since we last paid attention to the state of religion, it has become far more diverse and heterogeneous. I think religion has become much more visible for a number of reasons: because of policy and legal changes to do with equality and discrimination, security issues, they’ve all brought religion to the fore. So that’s all helped its visibility.

But for thinking about the place of religion in the secular, I prefer the notion of the “sacred” which I think has more purchase in secularised contexts: where values, ethics and beliefs are still held dear, where many objects, icons, persons, institutions are held to be non-negotiable to people, the sacred hasn’t gone away. It’s often been confused with “religion”. But that idea that there are still things that are important to us and worth fighting for has never really gone away. We just didn’t really understand it, and failed to understand that religious studies scholar had something to contribute to the debate about ideas, meaning and values because it went somewhere else: to sociology or political studies or whatever. But now people in those spheres and disciplines have begun to take religion seriously and so researchers have been able to be heard – making religion more audible as well as more visible.

Do you in your research have any shorthand word, idea or metaphor that you use to describe these shifts that you’ve been talking about?

No. I wish I was that clever! I press home some of these concepts I’ve been using but I think they all require explanation, that’s the trouble. Religious and secular relations need further unpacking. The terms the “sacred” and the “secular sacred” need unpacking. I’m interested these days in using terms that are going to have a resonance for people that don’t have much knowledge about religion. So the term “sacred”, you don’t have to work very hard with that concept for people to see that actually they use it in all sorts of ways in everyday life to signal the things that are deeply important to them, and it’s easy to give people examples that make them see that the sacred is operating right across the board and not just in religious contexts. 

I would say also, on the other side, any word that signals outreach or collaboration, and that helps that process of engagement to work, is an important word for me. It’s as much about the process of working together across boundaries as it is diagnosing what the issues might be.

Where do you think the debate is going to go in the next five to ten years?

I don’t think it’s going off the table, there’s only room to do more of the same kind of work. The more we can do to learn from one another across the academy/policy divide the better. But we need to think about the boundaries. It’s no good us selling our souls to policy makers any more than it would be them doing the opposite. It’s about understanding that it’s hard work to make that work and for it to be productive rather than just being a talking shop: the policy version of interfaith dialogue or something. So we have to ask about how researchers can ask questions of policy makers in ways that help them without compromising the interest and ethics that researchers have.

In terms of the future beyond the UK, it’s been very slow in Europe for these debates to get going. I think there’s some mileage for spreading the debates beyond the UK, and I think more international and global work could be done. Although I think it’s telling that REF impact case studies will undoubtedly show there has been quite engagement with governments and NGOs beyond the UK. There’s been some already, but I think it can become more globalised.

And do you see the increase in global problems as opening up such projects, or will it perhaps foreclose them by influencing a reactionary closing down and sticking to what’s known?

We’ve already done a reasonable job in showing that there aren’t any situations in which the arts, humanities and social sciences don’t have a role to play in understanding these kinds of issues. In every new crisis it seems like we’re back to square one, but in some we’ve been lucky in that religion has been at the forefront. This has helped us to get religion back on the agenda. It’s sad that, around issues of security and radicalisation, religion has been to the fore, and we obviously then have to be prepared to really argue about what role religion plays. But it has meant that religion has come back on the agenda. And in many of the big issues in the world – climate change, international security, migration – religion and religious organisations are key players. But we have to keep making that clear to funders.

Is there anything you’d like to say that we haven’t covered so far?

The only thing I would say is that, whilst policy is a key area, and is different to a number of others, I welcome research that engages with the widest possible range of non-academic constituencies: wider publics, public bodies who may not make policy but who have other kinds of roles. So let’s not get too fixated with policy. If we could be cleverer about the processes of engagement, beyond the talking shop that doesn’t go anywhere, we’d be doing ourselves a real service. I would also add that any hardening of the boundary between the religious and secular is unhelpful, which is why I use the word “sacred” to try and draw the two together. And we have to be aware of the discourses and practices that are going on at a grassroots level and focus on engaging with them.