Interview: Stephen Pattison

Stephen Pattison is Professor of Religion, Ethics and Practice and HG Wood Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Stephen is a practical theologian and ethicist. He studies the relationship between beliefs and values and practices, both within and outside formal ‘religions’. One of his principal roles in Birmingham is to direct the Doctor of Practical Theology programme, a  part-time degree for researching professionals from a variety of practice backgrounds, religious and other.

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

Off the top of my head, it’s really patchy. I think there is the popular media point whereby religion is variously lampooned or lauded to different aspects of things, either seen as bit of a threat, as in extremist people who seem to have ideas that are too strange for most normal people to contemplate. That's the popular press aspect of things.  Through to the Church of England trying to reposition itself as the provider of welfare services with the roll back of the welfare state. Through to people doing the usual things like lampooning religious professionals and trying to find out what they do wrong. So Justin Welby and the Wonga thing being a case in point whereby people say well, silly beggers, you didn't know to leave that.

You know, not realising how its own institution works and the Church of England not getting its act together to do anything. Or religion as a sort of new solvent for social problems providing for things that go wrong like food banks and that sort of thing.

But actually it feels pretty patchy. I'm not sure there's a debate going on. And wherever you look there is, for example, Linda Woodhead and the Westminster debates - elite people talking about top people in academy and religion. Talking about issues, but in a certain kind of sense that has been going on forever. What's the place of the place of the established church, where does it fit into the world, does it still have a place? And I sort of feel that in almost none of these places is there anything really cutting edge going on. It feels like it's either rehash, or a kind of retrenchment, or kind of fear. I respect all the people who are involved in these discussions, but it feels like nothing much is really happening. You yourself are the person who is at the real cutting edge of this stuff.

That's very kind of you.

But a lot of it, I don't know. Some of it is about rapprochement, the usual stuff, about ‘Is there a place for religion in the public sphere?’ Which I think is clearer than it was ten years ago, but I'm not sure that's anything other than a discussion about pragmatics rather than a discussion about really knowing what the issue here is. I mean there's a good way forward either for society or religious groups as opposed to just a sort of accommodation. You know, it's got up the agenda now, we've got to discuss it. So look at the literature that comes out of it. On the whole it's not that impressive really. But then you can't be too surprised because of there aren't that many people involved in it.

When you say literature what literature do you have in mind?

So for example if you look at journals like International Journal of Public Theology  it's quite interesting for those of us who are interested in it, but it's  somehow  it's not culturally where it's at, in the same way as for example, art works by that Chinese artist, what's he called Ai Weiwei. There's a sense in which there isn't the kind of importance that there might be. And I think in so far as the debate moves forward,  it's often used by people inside religion as a kind of 'oh good, we're coming back to the agenda' in terms of significance. On the part of politicians, we need to have some friendly people inside religions.

So it's no longer so shameful to be a conservative Christian anymore. Perhaps that's alright now. I feel that there's been quite a lot of emergence of public Christians, for example in parliament, usually of an evangelical sort.. From my perspective it feels like the official standoff between religion politics or the public sphere has ended, but what's replaced it isn't really a very considered approach or what you might call in depth, or indeed creative. Creativity probably isn't there.

It is better that religion is more visible and it has more opportunities to be considered. But on the other hand, I'm not sure that this is particularly exciting intellectually or even practically, other than we've got to find a place for religion you know, where religious people feel happy or something like that. And even that is kind of dealing with a very partial understanding of religion and religious people, because of course a lot of religious people are not particularly articulate about all of this anyway and are not that bothered. I mean they're just getting on with whatever it is they do.

Thank you. That's actually a very healthy analysis, I mean the picture you're painting is of lots of conversations that are happening but they're not happening in a particularly joined up way. And there's like a big space, a big void in the middle, where lots of things are falling through or simply not being addressed in terms of public policy.

It's very pragmatic.  It's perhaps a good thing to be pragmatic. One of the perhaps good things about living in England, possibly even more than living in other parts of the UK, is that, I mean you'll probably be familiar with that article with Giles Fraser where he talked about how we'd rather have our vicars ridiculous and harmless, rather than dogmatic and committed.. The comic vicar is less threatening than the puritan divine who knows how the world should be oriented.

I don't know quite what it is Chris. There's some sense in which we're kind of coping with it, but we're not coping with it, and in a non-dogmatic way. There's a lot of very pragmatic stuff on at the moment.  I was just listening to This Week in Westminster last night, and they're saying  tomorrow there's the debate in parliament on whether there should be fixed term parliaments, and they're saying well, there's a major constitutional change, i.e. let's have fixed parliaments which was rushed through in a matter of days.

That tends to be how stuff is done in England. I always found policy and policy making a very difficult thing to understand, trying to trace down where policies come from. But I often think they're quite pragmatic, that the Conservatives didn't come in thinking we're going to privatise every thing, but once they got there they thought,, well we could do this. England probably is an ideological country in the sense that it's centre-right. But it's not an ideological country in the sense that it starts from let's talk about the theology or let's talk about the principles of equity and justice or whatever that means. It's more like what works and how we're going to do it.

In that sense, for example the bare arms thing was a classic case, the Muslim nurses who said that well if we're forced to change our dress code and show our arms then we can't continue working in this hospital and we'll have to resign.  Then somebody said, what about paper sleeves? And that's the way that English people in public and in practice feel that if they wear the paper sleeves, then actually the paper sleeves were a really good solution to what would otherwise have been a really formal kind of standoff between religious groups or nonreligious groups.

I guess a question worth asking at this point is whether you share Habermas' idea that one of the good things about religion making this re-emergence into the public sphere is that it reminds everyone, not just religious people, that we need to have a deeper understanding of values and ethics in the way that our public life is shaped.

Well I would like that. But the picture you've been drawing is a little more haphazard than that. I think that one of the things about living in England is that we don't live in or like grand narratives. We either tend to be critical of them or we inhabit them. So for example, we may live in a neoliberal authoritarian state which in many ways we do, the very erosion of various liberties, , but there's very little discussion about that in terms of citizenship, or in terms of who and what we are. We just seem to be very pragmatic about how we conduct ourselves and our relationships. You know like if we were an ideologically driven country we would be all out on the streets protesting about the cuts and the austerity and the inequality that's been foisted upon us, but we don't even seem to be that bothered about that at the moment. If there was ever a moment where the British people should rise up and kind of throw out their masters this is it.

So would it be fair to say that you see religion as being unable to provide any counter thrust or counter momentum to that. Is it there just making people's lives very vaguely more bearable? Is that the best it's capable of doing?

That seems to be where it mostly wants to position itself. I'm thinking here about food banks, and I'm thinking here about some other people I've heard talking,, bishops from the House of Lords, talking about a sort of modified Christendom which seems to be about a welfare state. William Temple gave away all this stuff, now we'll have it all back again and we'll do this work for the public services with a quarter bit of money.  ‘But we've discovered what it means to be the soul of the nation again’. ‘People will have to come in to church related things in order to get food, and this will show what? I'm sorry, I'm not denigrating the people who do this. Do you know Helen Cameron's paper in Practical Theology about food banks?

I haven't read it, no.

Well you ought to have a look at it because one of the things she says is that if we go down this road of providing food banks, providing stuff at the bottom of the cliff for people who have fallen off, then from her experience with the Salvation Army and internationally in New Zealand and Australia you never get back up to the top of the cliff again.

You never start having the discussion about equality and justice and rights. You're always going to be talking about charity. And I think that churches pretty much go along with it. They think, oh we've got our social role back again, which is always of course great, but in other ways, is almost prophetic, because t the Churches ought to be doing parabolic actions, things that challenge people to think differently. So for example in hospital care, the Church has come along and said well the people are dying and they're not getting respect so let's have a hospice. They've set up hospices, then after a while the hospices ceased to be Christian institutions.

They are all full of ex-Christians and had some sort of a kind of religious motivation behind them. But they become de-religioned, de-ideologisised, in that sense. Then they float off and in some sense this is a nuisance. People forget the religious and Christian origins of these things and in doing that, they want to exclude religiosity, or perhaps put them in another place. The idea is that you become a major welfare provider is almost always proven to be a bad idea. Back in the Diocese of Birmingham thirty years ago, around the time of Faith in the City, the Bishop of Birmingham muddled by the fact that he had a little discussion, I believe, with the Government.

They said, 'Look you've got all these grants for your urban projects you're doing. If you start speaking up about inequality and injustice and making it difficult for government, the money will disappear.' And the churches said 'Well oh gosh, we're employers. We can't afford the government to take it away'.

Thanks Stephen. That's really helpful. I like this concept of modified Christendom. I think that's quite suggestive. So moving forward then, where do you think this debate is going to go in the next five to ten years?

Well that's difficult isn't it? If I'm right in thinking that the way religious groups are going to deal with this, we now have an opportunity to get state support and state funding to do things that we used to do and would like to do again.  I can't think that the debate is going to get more critical really. So I think the pragmatic tone of it is likely to prevail. I think there will be more public discussion about religion and its place in society, but I'm not sure that it will become much more developed than the usual sort of 'Oh dear, Christians aren't quite as nasty as we thought.’

As in implication of what you're saying, do you think the kind of discussion about religion still won't touch, connect with or shape what's going on on the ground in terms of the pragmatic approach that's being adopted?

I think a sort of decent critical pragmatism might be better than a non-decent, uncritical pragmatism. I think at the moment we're basically in an uncritical pragmatism which is mostly about 'Let's hope somehow religion influences public ideas and policies for the better.’ In return for that we get a certain amount of support for things like chaplains and church schools or religious schools or whatever, then I'm not sure I would see it as becoming enormously more critical or prophetic.

And I think that's partly the signs of the times. On the one hand if it got more prophetic then the debate would start to have tones of religious extremism and that would be unacceptable for the country in general and unacceptable for quite a lot of religious people themselves. I'm struck Chris by the fact that we've got loads and loads of these centres for the study of religion and public life and public theology. Almost every university in the country has got one of these things.

We've got one in Birmingham called the Centre for the Understanding of Religion in Public Life.  The impact of these has been minimal I think. Both in the theological role and in the public role. There is a, I wouldn't call it quite a cocktail circuit, but a kind of group of people who are wandering around the world talking to each other, some of them self-designated theologians or church people, some of whom are politicians, and they do have discussions with each other rather like the blue Tory, red whatever it is.

Blue Labour, Red Tory, yes.

That sort of thing. Which has got a certain kind of undergirding with certain kind of theological influences, but I'm not sure what it's really doing. I mean it's all very top people talking to each other in decent ways and they all go away and somehow by osmosis or something like that you achieve great things. For example I'm told at the moment that the Catholic Church is having lots of discussions with bankers in London about how they could amend their wicked ways and become more ethical. But there's sort of pretty much no evidence from my perspective.

I really don't see there's very much more than people doing little bits of work on their consciences. ‘Listening will somehow change me for the better.’ There's no real challenge, not even from the Methodists, or the usual people who have often hammered away at the justice and inequality stuff. All of that seems to become terribly muted doesn't it? I mean who is talking about the National Health Service? Is it the churches? No it isn't. It's certain kinds of politicians who are at this juncture preparing for a general election aren't they? So there are hundreds of stupid ideas coming out about how it could be better.

The truth of the matter is what we're talking about is ‘Are we committed to having universal provision of benefits for people irrespective of where they came from and what their needs are?’ that we're actually going to do something about that. It really has very few public defenders. I think even the churches got sort of tired and are just thinking 'Okay, well, that's the way the world is going to go, so our next position is going to have to be as a new welfare state'. So I don't see there's any great potential for critical dialogue that's going to really make a difference.

Do you have an intuitive sense that there's every chance that this status quo will carry on for the next five to ten years?

Religions just keep on helping people to run schools, you know, it wants to do that and also benefit from it, and benefit people from doing that. So there's that business as usual aspect. For instance, I was just thinking, in schools over the last five years when religion has supposedly become more salient in our society. We are more aware of the need to understand people, but there have been cut backs in religious education that's been relocated in terms of its importance and training teachers to do it.

There is going to have a big blow back into universities because we have fewer students because there are fewer opportunities for them to go and work with the subject once they get out.  I can't see that the quality and the depth of the debate is going to get better, because I don't think we're going to be able to produce people who can see it as either having the opportunity or can see the point of trying to engage with something which is actually being privatised. Religion is being privatised like everything else.

That's my hunch about it. The only place where I can see the debate becoming more focused is if something happens within the world of religion that makes it more problematic to the state, in which case the state will want a solution in order to sort out religious people and get them back in their box. And they'll do a certain level of massaging around the edges of that. I'm just being opinionated, but honestly, I don't think there are huge opportunities for the rapprochement of a kind that's really going to make a difference, except perhaps from the conservatives or the radicals in parliament.

Maybe other kinds of conservative people who may get into parliament with strong religious convictions who would then try and influence law making or policy making according to their own lights. But I think they wouldn't particularly interested in the thing called the religion and public life debate because that's the sort of thing that people like you and me are interested in who are brought up in the old liberal sort of post-Christendom. ‘Well we ought to have discussions about this and we ought to take each other seriously.’ Like the Archbishop of Canterbury going to Downing Street and having a conversation with the prime minister like school mates from Eton.

That sort of world it seems to me is probably gone, but there's no other worlds that's effectively replaced it. So even the people like Blond have been pretty much marginalised within the political debate haven't they? They're now speaking into the world of religion not speaking into the world of politics. That particular thing provided a sort of run into the sand and everything has moved on further. And definitely the way that people in religions are left out in relation to talking about religion and religious education seems to leave me with very low expectations about how seriously it’s going to be taken unless religion becomes a problem or people start to become awkward. In which case there’ll be some energy there for dealing with that, but not a lot maybe.

Okay, thank you Stephen