Global Justice in a Postsecular Public Domain: Challenges and Possibilities
Thank you Christophe, and good afternoon everyone. I’m delighted to be
here attending the ESA Sociology of Religion Network Conference on Religion
and the Public Domain and grateful to be asked to give one of the keynote
addresses. Thank you to the team, especially Gladys Ganiel, for the invitation.
I was recently in Malawi and South Africa as part of a research project our
Centre is working on related to the role of faith in development. A colleague and I
were conducting interviews with community leaders on the role of religion in
addressing issues of gender inequality and gender-based violence in developing
communities.
One such interview was done with a police officer in a small community in
KwaZulu Natal, approximately two hours drive from Durban. We entered the
local police station and wandered around for a while, knocking on doors, trying
to find the police officer that had agreed to be interviewed. After waiting for a
while and beginning to wonder whether there had been some kind of mix-up, a
door opened and a woman looked out. ‘Hello, did you knock? I’m so sorry, I was
having my moment of prayer. Do come in.’1 We enter her small office and learn
that she is the Warrant Officer at the police station whom we are to interview.
She offers us a seat, whilst arranging her desk. A laptop on a shelf is playing a
video with a pastor giving a sermon and a document about spiritual warfare is
pinned on the wall behind her.
We begin by asking her some questions about the most significant crimes
in the area, which are assault and rape, most frequently of women. We then ask
about the specific challenges that exist in the community around addressing
these crimes and what she thinks are the most appropriate and effective ways to
address them. Then we move to the specific topic of religion - what role, if any do
or should religious leaders and religious institutions in the community play in
addressing these problems? Is it important that they are involved? We had
already been slightly surprised by the sermon playing on the laptop and the
spiritual warfare document pinned to the wall, but her response to this question
was not what we were expecting:
1
I have withheld the names of our interlocutors to protect their privacy.
1
Definitely it is important. I believe pastors need to be informed because they will
intervene with prayer. I believe we cannot fight crime without the involvement of
the power of God. In prayer, my God tells me that there is nothing that we cannot
do. It is very important it is the first of all things that need to be engaged in by
pastors.
Her responses to the questions we posed to her, and our own surprise at these
responses, are, I think, exemplary of the different ways issues of injustice are
conceptualized and approached in our contemporary globalized context,
especially with regard to the role of religion. We - two white, Western, female
academics - were surprised that a police officer, a very public figure and
representative of the state, would openly and unabashedly discuss spirituality as
a legitimate, even a fundamental, primary response to problems of gender
inequality and gender-based violence in the community. Such expressions of
religiosity sat uneasily with our understandings of the public realm, but also with
the broader development context in which we were working. Indeed, the
organization we were working with, World Vision International, itself a faithbased organization, had designed a program explicitly utilizing theology to train
pastors in addressing issues of gender-based violence and gender inequality.
Their rationale for this, however, was quite instrumental – religious leaders are
often very influential in their communities. Consequently if you can alter their
attitudes and motivate them to take action, it will have an impact on the
community as a whole. Their own argumentation on this hardly refers to the
transcendent or the spiritual at all.
Yet the warrant officer’s responses reveal that, from her own perspective,
and within her community context, such expressions are normal and accepted.
Indeed, in this context, the spiritual and transcendent seemed to operate as a
form of empowerment for many people that we spoke to. While many in this
particular community expressed hopelessness that things were ever going to
change with regard to attitudes towards women and the levels of gender-based
violence in the community, belief in God and the power of prayer provided them
2
with an avenue to take action, where they felt all other action would inevitably
fail.
This story illustrates many of the problems that I wish to raise in my talk
today. It suggests that there are competing understandings of the divisions
between the public and private spheres operating in our global society, indeed
whether these spheres exist at all in some contexts, and between the religious
and the secular, that are not simply being observed and analyzed by academics,
but that impact policy and practice on the ground in relation to multiple issues of
global justice.
For scholars interested in questions of religion and public life, I would
suggest that issues of justice are central, but in ways that we often do not realize
and as yet I think do not fully appreciate. The main point I want to argue today is
that the very categories we presently use to make sense of religion and public life
– religious, secular, public, private – in themselves construct hierarchies of
knowledge and experience that lead to certain voices and perspectives being
privileged and others being excluded. Put simply, I am arguing that the
religious/secular divide contributes to injustice on a global level. It does so by
positing “secular” – understood as rational, physical, scientific, immanent,
universal, legal and predominantly Western - perspectives, worldviews and
actors as implicitly superior to “religious” – understood as spiritual,
metaphysical, transcendent, emotional, particular and predominantly nonWestern – perspectives, worldviews and actors. Thus the voices and opinions of
people for whom the secular does not provide their primary frame of reference –
that is, the vast majority of the global population and also the vast majority of
people affected by the major contemporary issues of global injustice - are
devalued and prevented from contributing to global political discussions and
decision-making on how best to address problems that are impacting their daily
lives.
This is not to say that secularism is the primary source of such exclusion
and marginalization. Obviously there are other issues at play, such as racism,
classism, neoliberalism and the after-effects of colonialism. Nonetheless,
secularism is a contributing factor and one that we are often least aware of. I also
do not wish to ignore secularism’s own contributions to the pursuit of justice and
3
equality. After all, in many ways the whole idea of a secular public space was to
address issues of injustice and exclusion, to prevent one faction within a society,
religiously or ideologically driven, from dominating over all the others. A secular
public sphere was intended to level the playing field, provide a space in which all
members of a society could contribute to public debate and decision-making.
While this experiment has succeeded in many respects, there are cracks
beginning to show, exacerbated by increasing global interconnectedness and the
expansion of the public sphere beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.2
By now the argument that secularism is itself a particular, culturally
embedded worldview has been well rehearsed by many eminent scholars. What I
wish to stress, however, is that this problem of the dominance of secularism is
not simply a problem for academics. Addressing secularist assumptions in the
study of religion and public life is not merely a question of improving our
scholarship. It is an issue that affects the daily-lived realities of people around
the world, directly and indirectly, and may in some instances limit possibilities
for agency and empowerment. The hierarchies of knowledge and experience that
secularism produces contribute to the exclusion of the knowledges and
experiences of multiple people groups. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has expressed it,
secularism is simply one of the ‘relations that articulate hierarchy through
practices of direct and explicit subordination of the less powerful by the more
powerful’.3
Aside from the fact that the world is currently facing immense global
challenges that require alternate voices, perspectives and creativity in
developing alternate approaches to these problems, the exclusion of these
people groups constitutes an injustice that at present we only realize in part, if
we realize it at all. As such, if we are to address this injustice, along with multiple
others, we must move away from thinking and talking about such issues within
spaces confined by specific assumptions about what the secular, the religious,
the public and the private are. These categories are all entangled and the lines
2
N. Fraser. 2006. ‘Transnationalizing the public sphere’. Yale University,
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0605/fraser/en
3 (D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 14.)
4
between them, if they exist at all, are blurred and indistinct, manifesting
differently in different cultural, political and historical contexts. This raises
significant questions over the analytical effectiveness of such categories and
whether we should be looking to develop alternative categories and frameworks
for thinking about the intersection of what we currently conceptualize as
“religion” with issues of global injustice. I am not suggesting religion should
become the primary frame of reference. What I am suggesting is that there needs
to be greater engagement across worldviews, and not just across religious and
secular worldviews, but all the different ways in which people interpret, make
sense of and respond to the world around them.
In my talk today, I want to deal with several problems and challenges,
specifically related to the religious/secular divide and how they affect efforts to
pursue global justice. To begin with, I outline some of the recent dynamics that
have contributed to undermining the secular as the most effective political
framework for realizing equality and justice. From there, I explore and
problematize the idea of a postsecular public domain that’s been put forward by
Jurgen Habermas, amongst others, as a means of dealing with the continuing
presence of religion in public life and the recognized inequalities that
subsequently result from this in a public domain governed by secular values.4
I will then offer a few reflections on the concept of “justice” before
discussing some examples of the problems I am raising from recent research
projects that I have been involved with, one on issues of asylum and
displacement, the other the project I referred to earlier on development. In
closing I will offer a few brief reflections on where to from here – if the
framework of the secular has not provided the level playing field that it was
supposed to, what can we look to instead as a means for including presently
excluded voices
and
perspectives, encouraging greater understanding,
collaboration and cooperation, and moving towards conditions that facilitate
greater equality and justice? There is still substantial work to be done to identify
specific instances of injustice that are related to the secular framework in
different areas of politics and public life and to work towards the development of
4
J. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Domain” European Journal of Political Philosophy.
5
alternatives. These are, I suggest, some of the most important tasks that scholars
of religion and public life can address themselves to in the 21st century.
Secularism
At its heart, the secular political project is bound up with questions of
justice and equality. In democratic societies that are highly diverse and plural
regarding both immanent and transcendent worldviews, secularism in its
various guises attempts to manage the relationship between these competing
worldviews in order to provide the best circumstances for the pursuit of the
common good. In its original 19th century incarnation, secularism was not hostile
to religion but rather offered a means through which believers could be given
sufficient freedom to resolve moral questions according to their own conscience,
without unnecessary interference from the state.5 Much has changed since then,
with regard to religion, secularism and society as a whole. New challenges have
emerged that highlight the shortcomings of secularism and raise questions
regarding its utility in its current form, whether secularism needs to be entirely
reconceived or indeed whether the very concepts of the “religious” and the
“secular” need to be done away with completely. In short, these challenges hint
at something of a “crisis of secularism”.
The first challenge is the emergence and subsequent recognition of
secularism as an ideology.6 Within sociology of religion, political philosophy,
religious studies and International Relations, scholars now widely recognize that
secularism is not the neutral, universal arbiter of reason and political
deliberation that it once claimed to be.7 Rather, it is a highly specific, culturally
embedded model for managing the relationship between religion and politics,
5 Kmiec, p18; Asad
6 J. Casanova. Public Religions in the Modern World. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994)
7 C. Eberle. Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), E.S. Hurd. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008); A. Kuru. ‘Passive and Assertive Secularism: Historical Conditions,
Ideological Struggles, and State Policies Toward Religion’ World Politics 59(4): 568–94. Philpott,
Daniel. 2009. ‘Has the Study of Global Politics Found Religion?’ Annual Review of Political Science.
12: 183–202. L. Mavelli, Europe’s Encounter with Islam: The Secular and Postsecular. (London:
Routledge, 2012), E.K. Wilson. After Secularism: Rethinking Religion in Global Politics.
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), S. Glendinning. “Japheth’s World: The Rise of Secularism and the
Revival of Religion Today” The European Legacy vol. 14, no. 4, pp409-426
6
albeit one that has now become very influential across many diverse regions of
the world.
The recognition of these dimensions leads to a further realization that
secularism is not just about the judicial and political arrangements for managing
religion’s relationship with politics, but is underpinned by an ideological agenda
that makes assumptions about the worth of religious belief and practice in
relation to other human pursuits, about the existence and value of immanent and
transcendent realms, about the very nature of religion itself. These assumptions
impact the way in which states engage with religious actors, with other states
where religion is far more central than it is in Western secular worldviews, and
how states carry out their policies. These assumptions also underpin global
governance structures and frameworks aimed at addressing issues of injustice,
including human rights violations, aid and development, displacement and
protection, climate change, conflict resolution and peacebuilding, amongst a host
of others. Secular assumptions are deeply embedded within these global
governance frameworks and are internalized and reproduced by actors that selfidentify as “religious” and as “secular” alike. It is only now that scholars are
beginning to explore how secularism as an ideology has affected a variety of
different areas of global politics and reexamine assumptions about religion’s role
in global civil society and about religion itself, and there is much more work that
needs to be done here.
The second challenge that has contributed to undermining secularism is
the impact of globalization, and particularly neoliberal globalization, on the
nature and reach of both secularism and the position of the nation-state in global
politics. While the state is still the primary actor in international politics, other
actors are taking on increasing significance and important changes are occurring
that make a consideration of religion, secularism and politics beyond the level of
the state timely and necessary. As Peter Beyer (2013: 664) has recently argued,
“the default unit of analysis or observation is no longer the local, regional,
national and in most instances western society, but rather global society as a
whole.” Globalization contributes to increasing interconnections across state
borders and the emergence of multiple public spheres that overlap and intersect
7
at various different levels of global civil society. 8 These multifarious and
overlapping public spheres necessarily affect the nature of secularism, since
secularism is both constituted by and constitutive of the public/private divide.9
Numerous scholars have begun to question the utility of this divide in the face of
the growing interconnections brought on by globalization. Indeed, it is a societal
division that has arguably only ever been applicable within the West and the
Western-centric international system.
An additional impact has been the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant
ideology governing state and inter-state economics. As neoliberalism has gained
increasing power at the national and international levels, alternative forms of
globalization have emerged such as grassroots resistance to the inequalities and
injustices brought about by neoliberal globalization. Prevailing forms of analysis
of these dynamics have undervalued the role of religious actors and worldviews,
affected by the ideological assumptions of secularism. Indeed, there has been a
dominant assumption that religion is incompatible with resistance movements,
since these are associated with progressive politics, and religion is often
assumed to be highly conservative. These assumptions are not always correct,
however, as the plethora of religious organizations engaged with social justice
issues and movements attests. Further, as Richard Wolin has argued, religious
worldviews may provide one of the few sources of resistance to the onslaught of
consumerism and competition associated with the neoliberal worldview.10
Religion cannot easily be classified as either an obstacle or a conduit for the
pursuit of justice and social transformation, and indeed such attempts at
classification miss the point, since they in general operate from within secular
frameworks. Instead, any efforts to address injustice must move away from such
categorization attempts and from stereotypical assumptions about religion and
instead seek to engage, deeply and continually, with “religion” and all its various
actors and dimensions in contextually sensitive ways.
8 N. Fraser. 2006. ‘Transnationalizing the public sphere’.
Yale University,
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0605/fraser/en
9 Taylor, Charles. 2009. ‘The Polysemy of the Secular’ Social Research 76(4): 1143–66, E.K.
Wilson, op cit
10 R. Wolin. 2005. “Jurgen Habermas and the Post-Secular Societies” Chronicle of Higher
Education vol. 52, no. 5, p16
8
A postsecular public domain?
How to practice this engagement with religion remains a significant
challenge however. Most recently, the postsecular has emerged as one potential
framework for rethinking issues of religion and public life. The recent work of
Jurgen Habermas has been one of the main catalysts for the engagement with
postsecularism as a means of explaining the continuing presence of religion in
supposedly secular (predominantly Western) societies. Habermas has pointed
out that, to a large extent, the rules around which contemporary political debate
and what is and is not permitted within the public sphere are premised on key
assumptions of secularization theory.
As is now well established, however, the predictions of secularization
theory have largely not come to fruition. “Religion”, variously understood, is not
dying out, but is taking on new significance and alternative forms.11 In this
“postsecular” society, Habermas argues, we must rethink the parameters of
acceptable public reasoning and debate and in particular reassess the
requirements that have been placed on religious citizens.12 A post-secular
society requires a process of mutual learning and translation for secular and
religious citizens alike and a shift to a post-metaphysical thought that, for
Habermas, does not make normative judgements on religious truth claims but
nonetheless distinguishes between “faith” and “knowledge”.
Yet, as many scholars have noted, Habermas’ engagement with the
postsecular is still largely done through a secularist lens. His solution to the
inequality of public debate is that instead of asking religious citizens to translate
their arguments in secular language, both religious and secular citizens must
translate their public arguments into a language that is universal and acceptable
P. Beyer, 2013. “Questioning the secular/religious divide in a post-Westphalian world” International
Sociology; J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1994); E.S. Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008); M. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the
Secular State, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); L. Leustean and J.
Madeley, ‘Introduction: religion, politics and law in the European Union’ in L. Leustean and J.
Madeley (eds.) Religion, politics and law in the European Union. (London: Routledge, 2009) pp. 1-16;
D. Philpott, ‘The challenge of September 11 to secularism in International Relations’ World Politics,
vol. 55, no. 1 (2002), pp66-95
12
J. Habermas, ‘Religion and the Public Sphere’, pp8-9
11
9
to all. Yet this language remains that of secular reason.13 While aiming to
rehabilitate religion into the public sphere, Habermas’ proposal is still very much
embedded in and confined by the terms of the secular.
In contrast, Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito have articulated the
postsecular, not as a description of present societal conditions, but as “a form of
radical theorizing and critique prompted by the idea that values such as
democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion, and justice may not necessarily be best
pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework. Quite the opposite,
the secular may well be a potential site of isolation, domination, violence, and
exclusion.”14 From this critical perspective, the secular may be conceptualized as
a mode of Foucauldian governmentality and control for the state, providing the
criteria against which all actors, logics and rationalities are legitimized or
excluded. The postsecular critique destabilizes categories of “religious” and
“secular”, “public” and “private”, “rational” and “irrational”, emphasizing that
such categories are largely historically, socially and culturally constructed.15 The
emergence of the postsecular critique represents part of a shift in sensibilities
away from secular assumptions about what is rational and acceptable public
reason, indeed, that the distinctions between “public” and “private” reason are
themselves products of secular ideology and that such neat, clean divisions do
not exist in reality.
Yet to date, the postsecular critique and the recognition of the partial and
subjective nature of secularism remains largely confined to academia and has yet
to permeate policy and practice. Indeed, arguably this recognition remains
confined to a rather niche area of scholarship on religion, politics and public life.
Further, while I am entirely sympathetic to the postsecular critique, I am
unconvinced by its utility as an alternative to secularism. As the critiques of the
Habermasian approach suggest, the postsecular is still in many ways too deeply
entrenched in secular modes of thinking to enable it to go beyond critique. The
postsecular is an important step along the way towards alternative frameworks
L. Mavelli and F. Petito, “The postsecular in International Politics: An overview” Review of
International Studies, vol. 38, no. 5, p936; A. Pabst, ‘The secularism of postsecularity: religion, realism
and the revival of grand theory in IR’ Review of International Studies, vol. 38, no. 5 (2012),pp1003-4
14 Mavelli and Petito, op cit, p931
15 L. Bretherton, 2010. Christianity and Contemporary Politics. London: Wiley-Blackwell, p15
13
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for thinking about how questions of the transcendent, the spiritual and the
metaphysical are entangled with and impact on various different aspects of
human existence in the contemporary age, but its contribution may be limited to
critique, not necessarily to transformation. It is in response to these concerns
that I explore the impact of the religious/secular divide in relation to questions
of global justice.
Global justice
Processes of globalization have raised questions about justice not
confined within state borders nor limited to political and juridical issues. With
the rise of global civil society and the global justice movement there is an
increasing tendency to include notions of historical, inter-generational and
cultural justice alongside judicial, philosophical and moral. Increasingly, identity
and recognition of identity are also being accepted as important components of
processes of justice.
In our contemporary globalized context, we must take into consideration
social, political, economic, cultural and historical dynamics across local, national,
regional, transnational, international and global levels. This requires the
adoption of broader, multi-scalar notions of justice. These should not be
understood as a hierarchy of scales, separate and distinct from each other, as
Saskia Sassen has pointed out, but as embedded in and entangled with one
another.16
Further, justice must be understood as a continual process, constantly
being refined, not an end-point. It must contain both universal and specific,
particular dimensions, constantly reconciling the one with the other. It cannot
simply focus on the individual or the state, but must be concerned with both
individuals and communities (and not just nation-states, but families, local
villages, regions and transnational communities) and all of these actors must be
both subjects and agents of justice processes. Finally, concepts and practices of
justice must be developed through critical reflection on both theory and
experience.
S.Sassen. “Globalization or denationalization?” Review of International Political Economy
vol. 10, no. 1 (2003); p7
16
11
Where religious actors are involved, it is also necessary to acknowledge
the claims to justice for what I shall call ‘spiritual’ injustices, for want of a better
term at this point. ‘Spiritual’ injustices are those that violate what a religious
group perceives should be the established or desired cosmic order or natural
reality. There are obviously degrees of scale in this. Some religious actors will
hold understandings of reality that are relatively easy to reconcile with religious
actors from different belief systems or with secular actors – the Parliament of
World Religions provides an example of this – participants in the Parliament
desire a more just, equitable and peaceful world, but do so for different reasons.
These different justifications create tension and debate but are not impossible to
overcome. (Maybe mention Maritain here). Others will be vastly, perhaps
irreconcilably, different. ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Army of God and a number of other
what we might label as fundamentalist groups provide examples here. A
significant part of the problem of global justice, then, is reconciling the multiple
worldviews and competing and contradictory understandings of shared
concepts. There is a need to develop a shared vocabulary, or at least to make the
attempt. It may not be possible to achieve mutual recognition, shared
understanding and willingness to work together on shared issues of justice
where vast divides in perceptions exist, but this does not mean it should not be
tried.
A further adjustment to concepts of justice relates to the rule of law itself,
an important component of any approach to justice, particularly in relation to
the problems of the religious/secular divide. The rule of law is frequently upheld
as a neutral arbiter of public disagreements, an essential ingredient of
democracy and, as Noah Salomon has observed, by development experts as a
“non-ideological” solution to the problems of post-conflict societies. In contrast,
Salomon suggests that “law, the institutions which promote it, and our
relationship to them enfold deep ideological and political commitments which
require a whole host of presumptions about justice and how best to achieve it.”
Amongst these deep ideological and political commitments exist
particular assumptions about the nature of religion and its proper place in
relation to politics, public life and particularly issues of justice. Benjamin Berger
has noted essentializing processes at work within law, where religion is
12
produced as primarily individual, private and a matter of choice. By defining
religion in this way, it becomes easier to justify and perform its exclusion from
the public realm. Additional assumptions related to religion that are present
within the law include a focus on institutional bodies and the subjective nature of
religious belief. Classifying religion as subjective (and arguably irrational)
disqualifies it from participation in the public realm, which is governed by
“universal” secular reason thus again ensuring religion’s separation and
exclusion from politics and public life.
These characteristics are arrived at through the essentially dualistic
nature of much secular logic, which separates the religious and the secular as
binary opposites and subsequently defines them through relationships to other
societal
elements
that
are
also
positioned
as
binary
opposites
–
rational/irrational, reason/emotion, modernity/tradition, male/female – and the
list goes on. These binary oppositions are implicit within and replicated by the
religious/secular divide that permeates and affects numerous areas of policy,
practice and daily life in many areas of the world. As yet, however, we do not
fully appreciate the extent to which this divide contributes to injustice and
exclusion. In the next few minutes I want to look briefly at two such areas – the
global crisis of displacement, and development – highlighting examples from
some recent research that point to the deeply embedded secularist assumptions
that inhibit our ability to pursue more just outcomes.
The religious/secular divide and global displacement crisis
Religion is not a topic that often features in discussions of the global
displacement crisis and when it does, it is usually in one of two forms – either as
one of the driving factors of conflict and violence that forces people to flee and
become displaced, or as one of the key sources of assistance for refugees through
faith-based organizations that provide relief and support for refugees and
asylum seekers in camps and in resettlement countries. This in itself highlights
one of the key effects of the religious/secular divide – that religion is defined as
either “bad” or “good”, often depending on the extent to which it is seen to
oppose or support broader, largely secularist norms. Casting religion’s role in
displacement in only these two avenues buys into the “good religion, bad
13
religion” narrative that has become a common place of contemporary politics.
“Good religion” contributes to global (secular) human rights standards, justice,
compassion and upholding human dignity; “bad religion” creates intolerance,
exclusion, violence and chaos. Yet such simplistic black and white
categorizations obscure complex dynamics of power and exclusion that are
embedded within the discourses and frameworks that we use to talk about
contemporary, state-centric global politics. For example, when thinking about
the needs of displaced people, the prevailing focus is on their physical needs. Yet,
within religious worldviews, such as Islam, the spiritual dimensions of people’s
lives are as important and require as much attention as the physical. This is not
to say that the protection of people’s spiritual needs should take priority over
their physical needs, but that the two should be given equal weight.
This subordination of the spiritual to the physical is related to the
entanglements between the secular/religious divide and the public/private
divide. At a recent workshop on faith and asylum hosted by my Centre, the
School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent and the
Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University,
participants discussed how religious belief is privatized in humanitarian
discourses. There is a willingness to acknowledge diversity of beliefs,
worldviews, cultures and lifestyles, but only on the surface. This privatization of
belief has contributed to a marginalization of faith, spirituality and faith-based
perspectives in humanitarianism and to what participants described as “an
instrumentalization of the religious assets of FBOs” – utilizing volunteer and
fundraising networks that FBOs often have through their faith communities, for
example, or the influence religious leaders frequently have in local communities,
without engaging deeply, seriously and respectfully with their core beliefs. As
one participant, an employee at a faith-based humanitarian organization,
expressed it, there is greater collaboration across religious and secular
organisations, but not across religious and secular discourses. Indeed, many
FBOs themselves talk down or exclude their faith commitments when working in
humanitarianism and refugee and asylum seeker support, adopting an almost
wholly secular discourse and excluding religion.
14
Some scholars and practitioners will argue that this is a good thing,
because it reduces the possibilities for proselytizing and the exploitation of
vulnerable people by religious groups eager for converts. While this is indeed a
danger to be wary of, this view fails to recognize that secularism and secular
worldviews can be just as normative, biased and exclusionary as religious ones.
One of our participants related the story of a UNICEF program he was working
on related to risks faced by children in humanitarian emergencies and how such
risks could be mitigated. At the end of one meeting, leaders of the community
raised concerns about the fact that program entirely ignored the religious values
they held, offering no opportunities to educate the children in the ways or
perspectives of their community, but only in the values and frameworks of the
global (largely secular) humanitarian community. As another of our participants
pointed out, faith doesn’t have to be religious, it can be faith in “making the
world a better place”. Secular humanitarianism can in many ways be its own
kind of faith, though of course we must be careful not to repeat the error of
overly essentializing the diverse perspectives of actors in this sector.
There is a real fear amongst practitioners, policymakers and scholars of
partiality in humanitarianism, especially emanating from religious actors
working in this sector, and an almost ideological insistence on neutrality and
objectivity, which they believe is achieved through secularism. Yet it may in fact
be more problematic to insist on the veneer of neutrality and objectivity, since
this to some extent encourages the suppression or ignoring of particular
normative views and assumptions, rather than openly acknowledging and then
critically self-reflecting on how our own deeply held beliefs and assumptions,
regardless of whether they emanate from religious, philosophical, political or
ideological traditions, affect our ideas and actions.
The privatization and exclusion of religious belief in humanitarianism is
entangled with an additional problem - the exclusion or marginalization of
refugee and asylum seeker voices themselves. What do asylum seekers and
refugees themselves want to see occurring in responses to displacement and
protection? How do they themselves see the role of faith and faith-based
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organizations in these processes? What role would they like faith and faith-based
organizations to have in the provision of protection? It is not an insignificant
point that the vast majority of the world’s refugee population comes from
regions of the world where there are no clear distinctions between secular and
religious and public and private, where these categories and divisions do not
really make sense at all.
The secular/religious divide is part of this production of power imbalances that
contribute to silencing alternative (non-Western) perspectives on global
problems, including the global displacement crisis, and may in part contribute to
the exclusion of the perceptions and voices of displaced and marginalized people
themselves. As such, we must be very careful about excluding worldviews that
take seriously the spiritual, metaphysical, supernatural and transcendent, in
which these dimensions of the human experience are not partitioned off from the
rest of life but are deeply embedded and entangled with daily realities. Such
exclusions devalue the ways of thinking and being of vast sections of the global
population, silencing their voices and limiting their sources of empowerment
and agency in what must be global conversations.
The religious/secular divide and development
A second area where the religious secular divide contributes to injustice and
exclusion is in the context of development. The goal of ‘transforming society’
through development has largely been based on a grand narrative of modernity
and progress, but a particular version of modernity that privileges economic
growth, democracy, individual liberty and a secular public sphere — in short,
moulding developing societies into the image of the West. The mixed successes
of this project have been critiqued by numerous commentators for a variety of
reasons, from the failures of neoliberal economic models to equally distribute
wealth, to the questionable human rights and democratic records of a number of
developing countries. Rarely have questions been raised about the secular
tendency within the development sector to exclude the spiritual, transcendent
dimensions of human existence.
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Yet within developing contexts themselves, many people highlight how
significant spirituality is in both personal and social transformation and that
social transformation and personal transformation are inextricably entangled.
During our recent travels, a local program manager with World Vision Malawi
stated in an interview: ‘As human beings we are soul, spirit and body, but we
[development workers and the government] forget the spiritual and the soul.
The spiritual influences how you think and act’. Such a statement from an
employee of a faith-based development agency is revealing. It provides
additional support for how “secular” development is, to the point that faithbased agencies themselves, where greater emphasis on the spiritual and
metaphysical dimensions of human existence is perhaps to be expected, are
actually to an extent complicit in the production of the secular/religious binary
within development. Religion becomes instrumentalized, a means to an end,
rather than part of the fabric of a community.
A community leader from the same village where the FBO was working
voiced a similar sentiment: ‘In our life there are several areas we need, one of
them is spiritual, without that we cannot make it’. For both of these interviewees,
coming from their different perspectives, community transformation always has
a spiritual dimension and indeed, personal and community transformation are
frequently entangled. This provides an alternate perspective to the dominant
frameworks currently utilized by development policymakers and practitioners
and one that may offer unique and creative ways to approach problems of global
inequality and injustice. While ever development approaches remain embedded
within the secular framework and the divisions between religious/secular and
public/private, such alternate perspectives will remain underexplored.
Beyond secularism?
Neither secularism nor postsecularism offer adequate frameworks for
addressing the theoretical and practical problems of injustice, marginalization
and exclusion generated by the religious secular divide in contemporary global
public life. As such, the task for researchers, policymakers and practitioners is to
explore potential alternatives that can make space for previously marginalized
voices and perspectives. In my book, After Secularism, I proposed a dialectical
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approach combining Bakhtinian dialogism and relational thought as one possible
framework through which these relations between religion and politics can be
negotiated whilst acknowledging the continual possibility of alternative
outcomes. 17 Relational dialogism offers a framework that promotes an
understanding of concepts such as public/private and secular/religious not as
separate, fixed and distinct from one another, but as inherently entangled,
mutually constitutive, constantly in conversation with each other and thus as
always changing. Relational dialogism moves away from traditional assumptions
implicit within secularism that something can be – must be - either public or
private or religious or secular, but instead proposes a “both-and” model. This
both-and conception offers a means for holding differing conceptions of the
nature of reason, existence, politics, religion in tension with one another, instead
of insisting on settlement and closure.
A second alternative to dominant conceptions of secularism is William
Connolly’s
notion
of
multidimensional
pluralism.
18
For
Connolly,
multidimensional pluralism encourages deep, sincere engagement and
understanding across traditional dividing lines. Secularism, in his view,
promotes a shallow tolerance, a “live and let live” kind of attitude that does not
encourage understanding and inclusion, but instead marginalization and
exclusion. It encourages the majority not to engage with minorities but to “leave
them alone” in their separate enclaves and societies. It also does not
acknowledge the implicit subjectivity of a secular public realm and the
assumptions about the nature of belief and human existence that go with that,
maintaining the illusion of neutrality and universality. Multidimensional
pluralism, by contrast, promotes profound respect of diversity and difference
through engagement and understanding. This deep respect and understanding,
rather than shallow, disengaged tolerance, is an alternative means to addressing
the seeming conundrum that presents itself to public life as a result of the
unexpected persistence of religion.
Perhaps, however, before we begin exploring alternatives, it is also
17 Wilson, 2012. Op cit
18 William E. Connolly. Pluralism. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005)
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important to understand more fully the impacts of the secular framework and
the religious/secular divide on specific issues related to global justice and on the
daily lived experiences of people around the world. The stories I have recounted
today only scratch the surface. Additional research is required into exactly how
secular assumptions about religion affect the lives of displaced persons in
refugee camps, of families and communities working with both “secular” and
“religious” development agencies, of efforts to promote action on climate change
and mobilize resistance to neoliberalism. Fully appreciating the ways in which
the secular/religious divide excludes and marginalizes people at the level of
policy, practice and daily life will contribute to the reform of that model and the
development of alternative approaches. It must also be acknowledged that the
issues and concepts I have discussed today – the public sphere, the nation-state,
global civil society, justice, displacement, development – are concepts and
problems defined by, arguably even created by, the Western secular worldview.
Other perspectives will not see the world in terms of these categories or
problems, not to mention simply having different priorities for what the main
crises and challenges are. In any global justice agenda, these kinds of differences
must be acknowledged and given space.
These are but a few amongst a plethora of challenges and possibilities for
moving beyond the problems of contemporary secularism and the ways in which
it exacerbates issues of injustice. In today’s increasingly interconnected world it
is critical that we - scholars, policymakers, practitioners, citizens, concerned
individual members of humanity - explore these and other alternatives further,
not just at the level of the legal and political arrangements within states, but also
the assumptions and frameworks that shape interactions at the grassroots and in
transnational and global relations.
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