James A. Beckford

The Changing face of religion

Introduction - James A Beckford and Thomas Luckmann Globalization, Politics and Religion - Roland Robertson Diffused Religion and New Values in Italy - Roberto Cipriani From Parish to Transcendent Humanism in France - Yves Lambert Religion in New Zealand - Michael Hill and Wiebe Zwaga Change and Comparison Afro-Brazilian Cults and Religious Change in Brazil - Maria Isaura and Pereira de Queiroz The Emergence of Islamic Political Ideologies - Said Arjomand Islam as a New Religious Movement in Malaysia - Daniel Regan The Sacred in African New Religions - Bennetta Jules-Rosette The Changing Face of Khasi Religion - Soumen Sen

The Insulation and Isolation of the Sociology of Religion

Richard Fenns view that the sociology of religion faces a methodological and epistemological crisis due to the alleged necessity to separate myth from reality is criticized for concealing the fact that (a) all sociological specialisms confront the same order of problem; (b) some of the sociology of religions hallowed concepts and problematics have been more serious impediments to its development in the recent past; and (c) the distinctive institutionalization of the sociology of religion as a subdiscipline has ironically contributed both to its past successes and to its present difficulties. The social processes of insulation and isolation are shown to have canalized the sociology of religion in a way which ensures its continuing marginality to the concerns of most sociologists. The fact that some sociological conceptualizations of religion have been coopted by religious actors and by agents of religious change has done little to check these processes. The conclusion proposes a programme of work which will demonstrate (a) the failure of mainstream sociology to take adequate account of religion and (b) the continuing, but changing, capacity of religion to influence social life in distinctive ways.

Postmodernity, High Modernity and New Modernity: Three Concepts in Search of Religion

The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the paradoxes that occur in attempts to relate recent changes in religion to the advent of postmodernity, high modernity and new modernity.1 The starting point is that relatively few accounts of postmodernity and its variants have paid much attention to religion.2 This observation may appear to be a strange basis on which to build claims about postmodernity and religious change, but it is actually essential to the main theme of the chapter. For the argument will be that advocates of the idea of postmodernity and its variants face formidable difficulties if they attempt to make sense of religion. It is not therefore surprising that, in all the speculations about postmodernity, serious interpretations of religious phenomena are rare birds.

Muslims in the Prisons of Britain and France

England and Wales, the largest and most southerly of the four component parts of the United Kingdom, is only 30 km away from France. Innumerable and ancient ties of politics, ethnicity and language connect the two countries. They both belong to the European Union; and they have both become countries of large-scale immigration from less economically developed regions of the world since the 1950s. On the other hand, their religious history and complexion have gone in radically different directions since the sixteenth century CE; their political and legal systems are strikingly different; and the place of religion in their public life displays sharp contrasts. This paper reports some of the preliminary findings of a 3-year, cross-national research project that aims to understand how this pattern of similarities and differences between Britain and France has affected the treatment of Muslims in prison. The main objective was to compare Britain and France in terms of their responses to the growth of their Muslim populations. The project was an extension of an earlier investigation that I had conducted with Sophie Gilliat into the role of the Church of England in facilitating the provision of religious and pastoral services for minority faith communities in prisons, hospitals and civic settings in Britain. We chose to focus on the treatment of Muslims in prison in order to examine the forces that condition the public response to the growth of religious and ethnic diversity. In particular, we wanted to test the hypothesis that Muslims might receive better treatment in a country such as France where, as a consequence of the separation of religion and state, no Christian or other religious bodies can exercise much influence in the public sphere than in Britain where the Church of England is established in law and sometimes influential in public life. The alternative hypothesis was that the involvement of the national Church in Britain’s public sphere may have paradoxically opened up more opportunities for minority faith communities to share favourable treatment in public institutions—such as prisons—than in France where the state’s ideology of laı̈cité or secular republicanism tends to marginalise or exclude them.

Social Justice and Religion in Prison: The Case of England and Wales

The policy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the United States is to show equal respect for all religious faiths, but the Prison Service Chaplaincy of England and Wales employs only Christian chaplains and is effectively controlled by the “established” Church of England. Recent empirical research shows that prisoners who belong to minority faith communities and new religious movements in England and Wales do not enjoy equality of opportunity to practice their religion. For example, their religious and spiritual needs are met by volunteer Visiting Ministers, who in turn must rely on full-time Christian chaplains to facilitate their access to prisoners, meeting rooms, and religious artifacts. This dependency gives rise to feelings of resentment, unjust discrimination, and marginalization among members of minority faith communities.

Ethnic and Religious Diversity among Prisoners: The Politics of Prison Chaplaincy

Using data collected in the course of an empirical study of prison chaplaincy in England and Wales, the author begins by establishing the sociological distinctiveness of social settings in which the “normal” freedom to practise the religion of ones choice is limited. The papers main argument is that the growth of religious diversity and the spread of religious indifference are now in tension with the privileged position of the Church of England in prison chaplaincy in this region. The Anglican chaplains obligation and willingness to “facilitate” the religious practices of prisoners belonging to Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh faith communities are meeting with increasing demands for independence on the part of their own Visiting Ministers in prisons. The concluding section of the paper examines three political dilemmas facing both the Church of England and “other faiths” in prison chaplaincy.

'Community' in the sociology of religion : the case of Britain

The author’s aim is to offer some critical observations on usage of the terms ‘community’ and ‘faith community’. The central argument is that ‘community’ is a weasel word that occurs frequently in discourses at the levels of everyday life, public policy-making, welfare services and social scientific analysis. The article begins by reviewing relatively uncontentious uses of ‘community’. The second section of the article analyses the UK government’s usage of the term ‘faith community’ in policy documents since 1997. And the third section explores two particularly problematic issues: on the one hand a tension that arises within official discourses about faith communities and, on the other, the UK government’s practice of treating faith communities as if they were undifferentiated collectivities. The conclusion urges sociologists of religion to avoid uncritically reproducing official discourses about faith communities.

A Bibliography of Social Scientific Studies of New Religious Movements

The purpose behind this bibliography is to bring together in one convenient listing the impressive number of publications that have appeared in the last two decades on the topic of new religious movements (NRMs). Clearly, the topic is so vast that some limits have had to be put on its scope for present purposes. In particular, the category of ’NRMs’ is confined here to those collective, organized attempts that have developed in the past thirty years to inculcate and spread religious ideas, sentiments and practices and that are not accommodated within longer-established religious bodies. Various criteria have governed the degree of selectivity that was imposed by limitations of space. Thus, the vast majority of items in the bibliography are written from the perspectives of anthropology, psychiatry, psychology and sociology. Most of them are in English, but titles in French, Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish have also been included. The geographical location of the phenomena investigated in this material is confined to North America ans Western Europe. The following kinds of publication have been excluded: official and quasi-official reports; anti-cult polemical literature; apostates’ (auto)biographies ; NRMs’ own publications; newspaper and magazine articles; theological assessments; and discussions of the purely legal aspects of NRMs. For referen-

Muslim Prison Chaplains in Canada and Britain

The separation between religion and the state is widely regarded as a central feature of modernization processes, but sociological research has tended to neglect the extent to which even ‘secular states’ continue to manage religion in such institutions as prisons, hospitals and military establishments. This article extends the understanding of the states management of religion by focusing on responses to the growth of religious diversity among prisoners and chaplains. In particular, it analyses the integration of Muslim chaplains into the prison systems of Canada and England & Wales. It is based on research – conducted between 2010 and 2012 – that investigated the frameworks governing religion in these two prison systems. This research involved analysis of official policies and regulations as well as transcripts of telephone interviews with a small sample of Muslim chaplains in both jurisdictions. The main focus of the findings reported in this article is on the implications that each prison systems arrangements for chaplaincy have for the work of Muslim chaplains and for questions about religious freedom and equality. These questions are timely in the context of controversies currently surrounding the increasing size of the Muslim prison population in England & Wales and Canada and the need for prisons in both jurisdictions to strike a fair balance between the recognition of religious diversity and the imperatives of security and equality.

Religious diversity in prisons: chaplaincy and contention

Prisons are sites of contention for many reasons, but the provision of religious and spiritual care to prisoners has long been regarded as a way of mitigating some of the most contentious aspects of prison regimes. Nevertheless, the growth of religious diversity among prisoners in recent decades has given rise to some new bones of contention which are closely related to questions of equality, justice and human rights. The aim of this article is to examine the relationships between religious diversity and contentious issues in prisons by drawing on interviews conducted with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh chaplains in the prisons of England and Wales in 2010 and 2011. The analysis shows that the growth of religious diversity in prisons is associated with problems concerning the official recognition of religions, the facilities and resources made available for religious purposes, the limitations placed on religious practices, and the status of chaplains. Some of these issues have a gendered dimension and are refracted differently by assimilationist and multicultural policies.