Interview: Linda Woodhead

Linda Woodhead MBE is Professor of the Sociology of Religion in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. Linda is well regarded across disciplines in the study of religion, having headed the £12 million Religion and Society Programme, and is a pivotal figure in developing the public understanding of religion, especially through the Westminster Faith Debates. Linda's work explores the realtionship between religion and social change worldwide, with a particular interest in the period from the 1980s to present. 

How would you characterise the present debate concerning religion in the public sphere? What are the standout features?

A standout feature of the most prominent debate in policy circles and the media is that it’s often dealing with a very narrow view of religion, and it hasn’t really caught up with the way that religion goes public in the 21^st century. It’s a bit stuck in the 20^th century in how it thinks about religion and how it engages with it.

My second point, related to that, is I think it’s a very top-down conversation; it tends to be political theorists, legal theorists, a lot of theory, and a lot of “seeing like a state” (or a court) without people really looking at what’s happening on the ground.

Can you put some flesh on the bones of the first part of that? This narrowness about  how religion and belief are imagined and how they really appear?

People still imagine religion and belief in terms of a narrow model derived from Christianity or one of the other monotheistic faiths, and filtered through a modern lens. Religions are perceived as coherent packages of beliefs and values, with founding figures like Jesus or Muhammad, and a scripture, leaders who are representative figures,  and the followers meet regularly together.

So basically this old view of religion that persists is tied into a short-lived modern era in which religion was a separate sphere with its own characteristics apart from the rest of public and social life, and you deal with it through its leaders as a completely separate realm in relation to which they have authority. And I just don’t think it’s like that anymore.

So what do you think religion is like?

I think religion has cut itself free, has deregulated itself. It’s not confined to a separate religious sphere, and it’s not under the control of the old religious leaders and authorities. So people are religious for themselves; it’s a kind of democratisation, it’s been opened up. Because of things like the internet, everyone has access to the symbols, teachings and practices that used to be confined to the religious elite.

Everyone has access to that, and because we’re in a much more diverse world, we all need to think about our religious identities more, and so people shape their own religious identities and make their own choices about groups they may or may not want to belong to. So it’s a much more deregulated kind of religion, which takes place in all sorts of spheres; in the work place; in the leisure sphere, in relation to healthcare: all sorts of areas of the public sphere, it’s not just separate from the rest.

And do you think that’s settling into any particular kind of characterisation of religion, or is it just hugely diverse and plural?

I think it is describable. I think it’s hard to define the contours of the new way of being religious because we’re living right in the middle of it, we’re living through it, and it’s in flux. I spend all my work trying to characterise it.

But I think there are characteristics you can see. One is it’s highly participatory. People don’t want to sit passively anymore; they want to be active agents in their own spiritual lives, so forms of religion that encourage participation, whether that’s charismatic Christianity, or going on hajj, they’re all doing very well.

Secondly, we want to stay very connected to our lives, to our bodies, to our health, to our families, our work. So more integrated and more embodied and lived religion.

Thirdly, I think religious leaders have to think more in terms of partnership with religious people rather than leading them in an old fashioned sense It’s more about facilitating, encouraging and offering resources to people as they live out their spiritual lives.

A footnote to that is of course there are also forms of religion which react against this and seek to return religion to very clearly defined, strongly bounded forms, sectarian forms, which are often called fundamentalist. But that’s a smaller reactive trend in relation to the wider development.

What’s happening then to these older forms? Are they just going away or disappearing?

No, most traditional religions are still alive and well and they have huge resources, spiritual, social, cultural, political and financial. Those aspects of them  which are aware of and going along with the directions I’ve been talking about can be doing very well, like the growth of charismatic Christianity -- alongside the decline of the forms which are still stuck in the old modes, so we see enormous decline of historic churches in Europe and now America for example. You see different things  happening within the traditions depending on how they’re responding. And then you see the growth of entirely new forms altogether, like non-tradition aligned spiritualities.

So moving onto the second part of where you started, about how much of this comes from the top-down, what’s the connection between the top-downness and these shifts to deregulated forms?

There’s a disjunction. Top-downess, looking at the world through the eyes of the state or the legal system, they’re still very important, but they’re still tied into a top-down notion of religion, whereas they should be applying themselves to the way that religion is actually evolving. There’s a huge disjunction between where religious vitality is in the world at the moment, and the kind of models of religion that are used in the media, by policy makers, by civil servants and so on. There’s a growing gulf between what’s actually happening to religion, and the way these disciplines are thinking about religion.

If you think about the debate about diversity -- how do we handle religious diversity, how do we handle multifaith, multicultural societies -- the debate has all been about, for example, how do we balance the law between protecting religious freedom and the freedom and rights of gay people and women? It’s all been at that very high level. What we’re not seeing is people actually looking at well how in practice, in the workplace, in daily life, how people have been negotiating difference.  For it’s at that level we will find the creative suggestions  based on the realities of people getting on with their lives and “doing diversity”. It’s here that nowhere near enough work is being done.

Has it ever been like this before or is this just completely novel?

Well it’s a gap between representation and reality, which happens in all disciplines and all eras because social life and religion go on moving and changing, and our concepts are always trying to catch up. But I think because religion has been changing so quickly  and so enormously since the late 80s, and informed study of it is still not widespread, there’s more of a gap than we’ve had for a long time.

And what do you think’s driving the gap and the speed?

I think the speed of change is to do with the collapse of top-down models of religion in the face of accelerating social change: growing migration, diversity, formation of new identities, collapse of the old political utopian dreams and the communist versus capitalist cold war mentality, and the growth of the internet.

And the growth of education; there are more and more highly educated people in the world, the more affluent with access to a lot of knowledge including religious knowledge, to make decisions for themselves, democracy. All of those things.

We’ve seen a huge world change and, not surprisingly, religion’s been changing along with it, on the one hand. But on the other hand you get thinking about religion that’s become stuck because there’s not enough resource given to it. Religion has been so neglected as a subject of research and serious thought and of serious media commentary, that there’s a serious lack of what Adam Dinham would call religious literacy.

Can we stick with education for a bit, and think about schools in particular, and then maybe universities. Let’s think through those formal spaces through which people journey and form their ideas. What have they been doing? Where have they come from and where are they now?

Things are changing and changing fast. In schools and universities, sticking with the UK for now, schools and specialists have been responsive to the changes. In schools they’re responsive because teachers are in touch with young people who are living through these changes. They may be hampered by syllabuses which aren’t changing as fast, although there are moves at the moment. But where schools can be open to where children really are, they work much better.

I think primary schools are a very good example of that, I think they often treat religion and spirituality very  well because they are in touch with where the children are, and open to their insights.

In universities there is also good empirical work on religion, and also there’s been much more investment in religious research, such as the £12m AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme which I was lucky enough to direct, which helped to mainstream religion research. It’s much more common now for everything from history to literature  to international relations and politics, subjects that wouldn’t have taken religion seriously, now appointing people in the area. All these are positive developments, but it is quite early days.

So data is improving and practice is responding, but what about the frameworks in which those movements emerge? I’m thinking of public policy  and regulation. You’ve already said those are places that mis-imagine religion and belief. Does that have to be got right before this can be properly addressed?

Yes I think that’s a blockage often. So in policy circles and legal circles, the entrapment in the old way of thinking about the old kind of religion that is no longer important is a major block, and can hold back curriculum reform, and can fossilise religion by wanting to talk to the old types of leaders and saying “oh well we can’t talk to Islam until it treats itself like Christianity with a leader at the top, and we can’t deal with Hindus at all”. All these things can be blockages.

However, the regulation of religion by the state is probably getting less important now than how religions are regulated in private law. So think of how important chaplaincies have become -- from prisons to airports. That’s not been regulated by the state, or by major religions; it grows up in universities within their private law, within the context of the marketplace, in a shopping centre or airport authority. This is more dynamic and unregulated than the old forms of religion and regulation, which can’t really keep control of religion anymore because it has cut free and is sliding into lots of spheres, both public and private, that it didn’t before.

So you’re making a really interesting connection between the private places in which religion plays out and the formal spheres, like law, which are trying too hard to over-determine the space, is that right?

Law in practice is catching up quite quickly. In practice the tribunals will learn quickly because they’re in touch with reality and they will become more expert in making judgements in relation to religion as time passes. But it’s theorists, like Habermas, who still dominate part of the discussion, who you read and think “you know nothing about what’s happening to religion!” But I don’t think that’s disastrous, because as I’ve said, things are moving in a better direction elsewhere. But it is frustrating.