Marian Burchardt

Multiple secularities : toward a cultural sociology of secular modernities

AbstractFor more than two decades sociological debates over religion and secularization have been characterized by a confrontation between (often American) critics and (mostly European) defenders of secularization theories. At the same time, there was a remarkable rise in public debates about the role of secularism in political regimes and in national as well as civilizational frameworks. Against this backdrop this paper presents the conceptual framework of “multiple secularities” with a view to refocusing sociological research on religion and secularity. We will demonstrate that it can stimulate new ways of theorizing the relationship of religion and secularity in a variety of modern environments. Arguing for a reformulation of this relationship within the framework of cultural sociology, we conceptualize “secularity” in terms of the cultural meanings underlying the differentiation between religion and non-religious spheres. Building on Max Weber we distinguish four basic ideal-types of secularity that are related to specific reference problems and associated with specific guiding ideas. Finally, we illustrate the use of the concept with regard to selected case-studies.

Contested secularities : religious minorities and secular progressivism in the Netherlands

In this paper, we propose to analyze ideas, practices, institutionalizations, and public controversies related to the religious-secular divide in the Netherlands in terms of contested formations of secularity. We introduce the concept of ‘multiple secularities’ and use it as an interpretive device for an analysis of the historical emergence and transformation of Dutch secularity. After that we show how historically shaped notions of secularity operated within the parliamentary debates on blasphemy, freedom of speech, and religion that unfolded between 2004 and 2009. We argue that long-standing notions of secularity as a means for balancing religious and ideological diversity are challenged by and give way to a new preponderance of secular progressivism. By secular progressivism we mean the idea that within an ‘immanent frame’ in which the secular ontologically embodies the ‘real’ and constitutes the ground for normative universalism, religion turns into a historical vestige whose protection must be subordinated to universalistic notions of civic liberties. However, this development is still contested in the Netherlands.

‘Multiple Secularities: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age’ – Introduction

Many of the key features of the contemporary era of global modernity bear powerful connections to religion and secularity. Worldwide migration brings with it the movement of religious identities and practices. Emergent forms of religious diversity challenge societies, especially those who have been marked by close connections between state, national identity and organized religion. More than before, migratory movements and questions regarding the rights of ‘newcomers’ are today at the centre of struggles over citizenship and maintain intimate links to struggles over the expansion of native residents’ citizenship rights as in the case of gay and lesbian mobilizations. In this context, the question of whether the religious tradition migrants belong to, and which presumably shapes migrants’ ethics, conforms to the values of host societies has drawn great attention in public debate. The demands of religious minorities to freely and equitably practice their religion and the practices of states to accommodate them are assessed in light of the values of democracy and human rights, and states, religious communities as well as ‘secular’ movements usually claim these values for themselves when justifying their lines of action in front of increasingly globalized audiences. Likewise, terrorism just as the so-called ‘war on terror’ responding to it and the forms of religious profiling of victims and potential suspects they engender, are fuelling contestations over religion and secularity. This suggests that secularity is often implied in social conflicts or processes of change that have other issues as their primary object. At the same time, however, the way secularity figures within configurations of modernity is fundamentally shaped by the long duree of civilizational history, by the way religion affects local cosmologies and

‘Transparent sexualities’: sexual openness, HIV disclosure and the governmentality of sexuality in South Africa

In South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, responses to HIV and AIDS have been accompanied by calls to ‘break the silence’ and to openly talk about aspects of intimate life, otherwise considered private. These calls have been followed by the production of new bodies of knowledge about sex, and projections of transparent sexualities. In this context, the concept of counselling has taken on particular significance in terms of re-conceptualising diverse institutional sites as places of education, advice giving and moral inculcation with a view toward behavioural change. In this paper, I trace a series of processes and practices of negotiation whereby in a big church in the city of Cape Town sexuality has been rendered an object of knowledgeability and inquiry. The same processes work as conditions of possibility for the emergence of counselling practices by facilitating the circulation of concepts such as ‘responsible relationships’, ‘responsible choices’ and so on through the sites of faith-based health activism. Adopted from public health discourse, but inflected by religious idioms, these concepts allowed for the dissemination of new vocabularies of sex in which counselling is construed as a key mechanism.

Religious super-diversity and spatial strategies in two European cities

The background to this article is the debate on cities as post-secular and super-diverse. The authors question that the concept of post-secular cities usefully sums up the complex processes currently characterizing religion in contemporary European cities. They propose that different historical memories are layered upon one another and they demonstrate how religious diversity and cities mutually shape one another. Based on empirical illustrations from research in Potsdam and Turin, the authors argue that cities affect religion by casting religious communities and their forms of sociality within particular spatial regimes and contributing to the territorialization of religious categories. Moreover, they state that religious groups shape cities by leaving durable architectural imprints on them. In particular, the article develops the notion of formations of religious super-diversity, which involves forms of religious belonging and identity that historically emerged through religious dissent and innovation, and shows that urban space is the iconic arena in which religious super-diversity becomes visible through the ways in which religious spatial strategies interact with cities’ spatial regimes. The authors identify three types of spatial strategies – place keeping, making and seeking – each of which expresses and responds to communities’ relationship to urban space in different ways. The typology is meant to serve as a tool to read complex processes taking into consideration both historical paths and contemporary religious formations.

‘Multiple secularities’: Postcolonial variations and guiding ideas in India and South Africa

This article draws on the concept of ‘multiple secularities’ as culturally embedded forms of distinction between religious and non-religious spheres and practices. The authors argue that those distinctions gain importance if they are supported by ‘guiding ideas’ that serve to orient institutionalizations of the religious–secular divide with reference to fundamental societal problems. Focusing on the cases of India and South Africa, the authors explore how different ‘guiding ideas’ emerge from particular histories of colonial and postcolonial entanglements and national emancipation. They demonstrate how and why tolerance and non-discrimination have become paramount values and key concerns in national debates in both countries. Whereas in India secularity (framed as secularism) has become central to struggles and discourses over collective identities, in South Africa its social, cultural and political importance have remained limited.

Editorial introduction: Sexuality, intimacy and counselling: perspectives from Africa

Across the world, talk about sex is seen as exciting and dangerous – and therefore subject to endless rules, taboos, incitements and proscriptions. Moral frameworks of conversation on intimate matters are often culturally specific, varying from place to place, but they also draw upon and feed into the large-scale institutional assemblages of public and global health campaigns that travel and span vast territories (Pigg and Adams 2005). In these institutional contexts, sexuality is addressed in terms of social or health problems and behavioural change. Tackling issues such as HIV and AIDS, gender-based violence, postconflict trauma or reproductive health (for both women and men), such institutional assemblages link everyday experiences embedded in cultures of intimacy with rationalities of physical enhancement, health, population politics and prescriptive socialities (Lupton 1995). As a consequence, the social practices of speaking about sex are critically placed between calls to sexual openness on the one hand, and secrecy and concealment on the other (Reid and Walker 2005; Hardon and Posel 2012; Moyer 2012). This special issue of Culture, Health & Sexuality is dedicated to examining practices of counselling as one of the most important social forms in which the dialectics of revelation and concealment play out. In fact, while the interface of sexuality and discourse is fairly well theorised – there are numerous excellent ethnographies of cultures of intimacy on the one hand, and of institutional apparatuses dealing with sexuality, public health or otherwise on the other (Nguyen 2010; Langwick, Dilger, and Kane 2012) – there are hardly any focused studies on such socially and institutionally impregnated forms. Counselling as a psychological practice has been a subject of study within the social sciences for many years. This is easily evidenced by the wide range of journals specifically devoted to the topic. Remarkably, however, counselling has hardly been studied in an interpretive mode. This special issue breaks new ground since it is the first collection of social science papers explicitly dealing with counselling on issues of intimacy and sexuality in contemporary Africa. Focusing on counselling allows researchers to study sites and interactions in which discourse on sexuality is cast into specific moulds, binding people in situations that generate observable practices that have important, if often also unintended, consequences.

Belonging and success : religious vitality and the politics of urban space in Cape Town

This chapter analyses how, the South African city of Cape Town, religious vitality produced by religious practices that are bound up with the ways in religious spaces and urban spaces mutually constitute and configure one another. It also pinpoints the complexities arising from the challenges of belonging and success as they take shape in the townships of Cape Town. The practices within which these challenges acted upon as both embedded in and generating local forms of religious vitality opens up a conceptual space for thinking about how religious spaces and urban spaces intersect. To differentiate South African cities from other cities on the continent is that here organized religion ties in with non-religious traditions of civic engagement and activism. Moreover, it re-channels the remnants of a not-yet fully sobered up nationalist discourse on collective progress, which promises both belonging and success, but repeatedly fails to fulfil the expectations it raises. Keywords:Cape Town; politics; Religious vitality; South Africa; urban space

Is Religious Indifference Bad for Secularism? Lessons from Canada

This chapter is focused on political discourses about religious diversity and secularism in the Canadian province of Quebec. Asking questions about how experiences of modernity bear on constructions of national identity, it demonstrates that secularization has itself turned into a powerful myth centered on the notion of modernity as liberation from religious bondage. The chapter shows how in the post-migration context native populations evoke different cultural memories of modernity against newcomers. It argues that these debates function as a context which shapes indifference, both in scope and meaning.

Equals before the law? Public religion and queer activism in the age of judicial politics in South Africa

Abstract On a global scale, the politics around the recognition of same-sex relationships has turned into legal controversies while opposition to it is often framed in religious terms. This article takes the case of Christian mobilization around the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in South Africa to investigate the intertwinement of religious and sexual rights struggles. Linking the anthropology of law, the sociolegal literature on judicialization, and studies of public religion, it argues that both same-sex activism and religious mobilization should be understood in terms of judicial politics. The article analyses religious responses to lesbian and gay judicial activism and presents a typology that reveals the structured diversity of these responses in terms of public discourse, political strategy, and legal argument. Two dimensions are key to conceptualizing these responses: religious communities’ ontological concepts of the world, including ideas about human agency and God, and their relationships to the world, construed in terms of political habitus.