Interview: Luke Bretherton

Luke Bretherton is a Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School. Luke is the author of Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The conditions and possibility of faithful witness. He contributes to numerous news media, including the Guardian and the Huffington Post

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

The metaphor I use is the shift from being in a shower to being in a jacuzzi. We used to have a showerhead model where everything was moving in the same direction and the bath would gradually fill up with secularity and thereby become a less religious space. It was a process through which we would be washed clean of our archaic and atavistic religious views. But I think in reality the context is more like a jacuzzi in that everything is bubbling up from everywhere. So whether you're Richard Dawkins or Franklin Graham, there's a sense in which the world isn't necessarily going your way. Obviously religious figures have thought that for some time. But now lots of other people are thinking 'No way, hang on a sec', we thought the world would become more secular but it seems as furiously religious as ever and we need to fight for our own particular space. So the defining feature of our context is plurality. Everyone has to confront the fact that his or her position or worldview is not necessarily normal or normative for the public sphere. I think this shift from the shower to the jacuzzi model is the key one. That's how I'd characterise the shift.

One framework for thinking about the contemporary situation is to call it “postsecular.” But I'm not sure that term quite gets at what is going on. I think a lot of scholarly work suggests we can much more accurately characterise our situation as one in which different constructions of religion, and therefore different constructions of secularity, are now bumping up against each other in shared space or shared territory. In Europe, what secularity looked like was seen as existing on a continuum. There were differences between France, Germany and Spain, say, but the experience of Europe was understood as the norm and as the pattern that would be followed by the rest of the world. But as it turns out the kinds of account of religion in the modern world that Durkheim and Weber developed, and the secularisation thesis in general, was determined by the European experience. We now see that how religious belief and practice and secularity are constructed in India looks very different to what happens in China. And China’s construction of secularity is very different to the US. Moreover, contrary to what the secularisation thesis suggests, in many places modernity leads to a rise in religiosity not a decline.

What's distinctive about the contemporary context I think, particularly since the 1990s, is the way in which the different constructions of secularity, and therefore the different facets, frameworks and sensibilities for what we assume about the public/political role of religion, are now living on the same street in the same city. But it is not just in the same city. Widely dispersed diaspora communities and the advent of mass migration, alongside other features of globalisation, mean we are much more aware of religious diversity and the need to navigate religious differences. Some of this is place specific. So in London you're more obviously aware of religious diversity than you are in Durham, North Carolina, where I now live. Durham is much more like a small town set in a rural context. There isn't the intensity of religious diversity here. It does exist, although people don't tend to notice it. That said, some awareness is not dependent on place. It is mediated via the Internet. For example, an American scholar publishes an article undertaking a Freudian analysis of the Bhagavad Gita. Someone in India reads about this on an obscure academic blog, publicises it, it goes viral, and it becomes a massive controversy leading to death threats to the author etc. So the sense in which your construction of 'I'm in a secular university and this is an interesting idea I want explore', and how that should be negotiated with religious practitioners thousands of miles away who are reading it in real time and going 'this is not acceptable,' that's another expression of this shift to a greater awareness of religious diversity. We had intimations of that with the Rushdie affair but it seems to me this is now the case amongst all traditions and places. Hence my metaphor of the jacuzzi.

The intensification of encounter between different visions of secularity brought on by globalisation and the internet means that the normal barriers of culture or time or geography, the kind that tend to keep different worldviews compartmentalised, are eroded or no longer exist. The previous ways of metabolising or filtering interaction over time and space are gone.

That's really helpful, thank you. So is there any way one can discern a metanarrative in all this, or is it all just simply competing localised multiple collisions of multiple realities and experiences? Is there a wider picture or wider dynamic between religion and the public sphere that you can detect?

I think theories of modernisation (for example, processes such as differentiation, specialisation, bureaucratisation and such) still have strong salience in that there clearly is something different about being modern. Clearly something's gone on, and how religion interacts with processes of modernisation such as industrialisation and bureaucratisation will be contextually defined. Religion can take up such processes and play with them extremely effectively, yet at the same time, it can also be marginalised by them. And both adoption and marginalization can go on at the same time. There is a kind of metanarrative, if you like, around the processes of modernisation and how religion both constructs modernity and gets de-constructed and reformulated through processes of modernisation. And that's going to be different according to different traditions.

So we have to be much more discerning. If I'm sitting in the Pentagon and realising 'well if Sunni Arabs are not the same as Iranian Shia's,’ it might then follow that “we” might need to be more friendly to Iranian Shias than we should be to Sunni Arabs. Everyone has got to start having much finer tuned sensibilities about these things. Also we will need to be far more aware of the ways in which differences play out between different religious traditions and the intra-mural differences within religious traditions. The need to be alert to processes of differentiation and the need for more granular views of religions will only intensify. In many ways, that is part of the process of modernisation: i.e., that we get far more differentiated and specialised in our categories. Up to now, we in the West have had rather clunky frameworks for thinking about religious phenomena. We also have had real blind spots about how the idea of secularity has been constructed in the West and the fact that secularity is constructed differently in other parts of the world.

So to some extent you've kind of answered the question about where you think this debate is going in the next five to ten years. I suppose one thing we might speculate about is whether this increased granularity, what the impact that has on things like politics, the way we conceive of diversity and trying to construct maybe a progressive politics. I know it's a given that we can't really say whether it's necessarily going to be progressive or regressive, but do you see how religion might fit into this new scheme of politics, community, law and that kind of thing?

Two things on the previous question. I think the role of institutions is crucial. Grace Davie and Danièle Hervieu-Léger's work on de-institutionalisation is key to understanding religions in the contemporary context. The dynamic is not, as they see it, one of secularisation, but rather one of de-institutionalisation. And de-institutionalisation leads to the “sacred” becoming unbounded. We see this happening all over the place. The paradox is that rather than secularisation being a process that leads to a decline in the public significance of religion, it leads to the re-appearance of sacrality everywhere. Now that I think is a trend.

The issue then is we tended to have this kind of Scriptural framework of reference with a strict line between the transcendent and the immanent. However, the more we become aware of religious differences the more we can see the difficulty of this kind of binary: for example, is Confucianism a religion, a philosophy, a kind of transcendent immanent or an immanent transcendent? Or are certain strands of Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? The largely Christendom derived division between the secular and the religious is breaking down in the contemporary context and we are perhaps returning to more ancient categories of sacred and profane. Within this schema lots of things can be sacred. So, for example, I think one of the big things that comes out of this is that as politics gets de-institutionalised it becomes re-sacralised. One expression of this is political Islam: a form of stringent modernity criticism not framed via one of high modernity’s secular philosophies (i.e., communism, socialism, etc.), but in terms of a religious form of discourse. That's what modernity criticism looks like in our context. It takes the form of religious discourses. You also need to look at Occupy and forms of radical eco-protest: the role of the sacred, ritual and the festive are key to these forms of political expression. So we are seeing the role of the sacred returning to some strands of politics. However, we then tend to interpret this phenomenon either via a disenchanted vision of politics or through an Abrahamic lens. But then we miss stuff and we make bad judgments. I think that's an interesting dynamic that's being playing out both in the academy and in policy.

Another example of the kind of process I am talking about is something like yoga. Yoga as a formal practice emerges as a response to British colonial rule in India. It is a way of contesting Christianity through framing Yoga as a more rational and modern form of religious practice than that available in Christianity. It is also a way of contesting how Indian religions were framed as irrational or not fully modern. Yoga is then taken up in the West where it is billed as a spiritual yet still secular (and definitely not religious) form of exercise. But now it comes full circle with the case in California last year about yoga being introduced into schools: the case is whether yoga is equivalent to school prayer and therefore should be excluded. As we get more differentiated, as we suddenly realise the contingency of the structure of our secularity, things that are a form of spiritual exercise, which were smuggled in and housed as just rational forms of physical exercise perfectly suited to a disenchanted public sphere, suddenly get unhoused and re-appear as sacred in form. And then having been unproblematic suddenly they become very problematic. So I think things like that are very interesting. They entail dynamics where there are transcendent immanents that confuse what's spiritual or sacred and what's profane. These kinds of designations are going to be intensively negotiated.

A related feature of all this is how we'll see the intensification and contestation of religion in micro public spheres such as prisons, the military, museums, hospitals, libraries, and universities. These are the places where we negotiate and practice the public sphere. For example, is it okay for us to go to the British Museum and look at things just as historical objects, or should we have a more reverential attitude to them? How then should museums house them? How do we deal with, say, an altar screen once in a church and now in an art gallery? Or what do we do with the dead in hospitals – can we treat them with reverence or should the corpse be treated as simply inert matter with no sacral significance?

One of the divisions I think we'll see intensifying draws on Charles Taylor's point about the loss of a cosmic social imaginary in which nature is understood as having something to teach us about how to live well. Part of the shift into modernity was away from a cosmic social imaginary to one wherein the world around us is just a flat, amoral, neutral universe on which I impose meaning. This “universe” cannot disclose to us any meaning. An interesting political divide that is opening up is not between left and right or progressive and reactionary, but between those who have some sense of a cosmic imaginary, whether that's of a transcendent immanent form or an immanent transcendent form, i.e., whether you're a Wicca eco-protester or conservative Catholic (or even someone who thinks spirituality is important) and someone who holds to a view of the universe as a wholly material and deterministic arena. This latter view can undergird both a neo-liberal rational choice driven politics and a state-centric, bureaucratic one.

Those who hold to some kind of cosmic imaginary are not necessarily “religious” in the Abrahamic sense, but they do seek to restore a sense of the sacred, albeit it in an immanent form. For example, we can look at something like humanitarianism as illustrating this kind of immanent sacrality. So I think you'll find one set of people trying to work within some sense of a cosmic social imaginary, and another set of people who are very strictly adhering to a distinction between facts and values. I think an increasing division along these lines is a trend. The question that emerges out of this trend for me is how the Abrahamic faiths will respond (each in their own way) and what new iteration of secularity will emerge as a result.

One potential result is that Christians in particular will end up with strange bed-fellows. Progressive Christians, for example, may want to unalign themselves with certain kinds of rationalisation projects. What were formerly seen as keys ways of liberating people from what was understood to be the dead hand of tradition may now not look so attractive. They will be forced to ask: “Who do we really want to connect with?” Are certain kinds of modernisation projects, particularly state-centric, bureaucratic and legalistic ones, simply leading to greater alienation and atomisation? If the answer is yes, then it may be that certain kinds of groups who “we” don't really like at the moment might actually turn out to be “our” friends. They have a richer sense of what it means to be human. Even though, as the same time, they seem very alien to “us.”

The other aspect of the trend I outlined earlier is that because some forms of belief are having to interact more and more, we're having to become more aware of other kinds of belief and their constructions of what it means to be modern and secular. This interaction and growing awareness of plurality will undoubtedly impact the Abrahamic religions as they try to come to terms with these dynamics around them.

So there's this idea of new affinities and new networks and as you say finding people alongside each otherwho weren't expected to find a common cause. We probably ought to come to the last question. Is there anything else you'd like to add or comment upon that we haven't covered in this interview?

In terms of politics, I think there will be increasing interesting in what I call “a common life politics.” A common life politics – and the kind of secularity it embodies – is different in kind from either multiculturalism or identity politics. The key difference is whether you're willing to contribute to a common life or not. The ticket of entry as a full participant in a common life is not adherence to a prior set of beliefs or ideologies. Rather, however unsavory your beliefs are to others, a better indicator of your commitment to the common life is that you actually turn up, you actively contribute to, and you invest as an institution or a tradition in forms of shared life. The contrast here is with those we may agree with ideologically but who don't want to engage politically, who don't want to negotiate a common life with others because they want to just control the space or stand above the fray. This is as true for those who adhere to certain kinds of religious zealotry as it is of those associated with technocratic, expertise-driven proceduralism and forms of ideological vanguardism. All such types see themselves as possessors of a special gnosis that enables them to know the direction of history and thereby privileges them to say how everyone else should live. I think there are religious and non-religious versions of this approach to politics. But in terms of the public sphere, this is going to be an increasingly pressing issue. In questions of diversity and negotiating difference in relation, we can discern three broad responses. First, there are those who are really investing and contributing, who really have a sense that their welfare is bound up in the welfare of others. Second, there are those who frankly just wants to tell everyone else how they should live. And third, there are those who are segmenting themselves out and forming a communalist, sectarian form of life - whether that is in a gated community or a religious micro-sphere where you can maintain your religious faith. One implication of this is that people get very angry and frustrated when people who don't want to contribute turn up and suck up and extract for their own micro-community the good that everyone else is doing: whether that is bankers or religious groups.

What else is interesting are the striking parallels between our situation and that of the early twentieth century. I think that period has much to teach us. From the Second World War we moved into a high modernist framework where a Weberian iron cage worked and everyone, whether religious or not, tended to get subsumed within it. By contrast, from the 1910 to the 1930s there was a weird melange between Christianity and new religious forms such as theosophy, combined with a kind of criticism and suspicion of both the state and the market, and a much more interesting and innovative milieu of political ideas and artistic movements. And basic questions about such things as “How do we care for the old?” “How do we educate children?” “What does good work look like?” and so on were being asked. These questions are with us again: having been settled and compartmentalized they're now unsettled and in flux. How we answer them will determine our shared future.