Global Justice in a Postsecular Public Domain: Challenges and Possibilities

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:

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 faith-based 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 veryinfluential 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 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 non-Western – 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 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 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 exploreand 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 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, 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 self-identify 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 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.