Drawing a line between the religious and the secular: the cases of religious education in Sweden and India

Abstract

Religion as a school subject – Religious Education (RE) – is handled differently in various national contexts. This article discusses two different systems of managing (or avoiding) RE: those used in non-denominational Swedish and Indian schools. The article focuses particularly on what is allowed in the classroom with regards to religion. Both countries are secular, but where is the line drawn between the secular and the religious? Allowing the two contexts to meet reveals the particularities of each. The impact of Protestant Christianity, specifically Lutheranism, is evident in Swedish RE: religion is to be defined through beliefs and words, and religious actions should be excluded from classrooms. The Swedish context highlights ‘knowledge of’ religions, but avoids religious action. In India, there is no explicit RE, but Indian education does include learning from religion as well as ‘doing religion.’ The Indian approach is very inclusive, to the point of emphasising, as teachers put it, a common core of all religions. Both systems of RE offer particular opportunities and face certain difficulties in dealing with the contemporary globalised world.     

Spirituality and religion in psychiatry: the impact of policy

ABSTRACT

Research and debate on the importance of spirituality and religion in psychiatry has led to a number of national and international policy initiatives, intended to clarify the boundaries of good practice and improve the way in which such matters are managed for the benefit of patients. Significant amongst these is the 2015 position statement of the World Psychiatric Association, the only such policy statement to date which has been internationally agreed. Preliminary evidence available suggests that this is having good effect in generating professional debate and further national policy initiatives in different countries. There is a need for further research on such policy initiatives to confirm whether or not they have the intended impact upon clinical practice and whether or not this in turn is beneficial for patients.     

Multiple Judaisms and mosaic selves: an ethnographic exploration of liberal American Jews

Debates about religion and secularism have called attention to the multiplicities of religions and secularisms that exist in modern societies. In this article, I draw on an ethnographic study of prayer, healing and identity among liberal American Jews, to demonstrate that studying Judaism as a religion obscures our understanding of multiply situated and continually evolving Jewish selves. These selves are best viewed as mosaics integrating diverse elements from Jewish religion, culture, ethnicity, history and peoplehood, as well as modern secular society. This Judaism is the product of individual agency and also embedded in communal frameworks, generated through a reflexive process of bricolage and an active engagement with multiple sources of authority, including imagined ones. It does not fit comfortably within existing analytical categories of religion and secularism, demonstrating that these categories, based on European Protestantism, are only partially appropriate to the study of modern Jewish life.     

A re-examination of religious fundamentalism: positive implications for coping

The majority of the research on religious fundamentalism explores its negative implications. Religious coping theory provides an opportunity to examine both positive and negative implications of fundamentalism. The present study incorporated various advanced methodologies utilised in the religious coping literature (mediation analyses, hierarchical regression procedures, and longitudinal design) to assess the relationship between religious fundamentalism and religious coping in 723 American college students. Religious fundamentalism was associated with a number of religious coping strategies that have positive implications and inversely related to religious coping with negative associations. Fundamentalism predicted religious coping over and above right-wing authoritarianism and religious orthodoxy. The religious coping methods mediated the relationship between religious fundamentalism and adjustment to stress both concurrently and over time. Limitations of the current study and suggestions for future research are offered.     

A method of ‘things’: a relational theory of objects as persons in lived religious practice

ABSTRACT

Material expressions of religion are some of the most visible ways in which the lived realities of religions can be examined and understood. Religious materiality not only mediates between a continuum of still productive dualisms that exist between ‘official’ and ‘lived’ religion, but is also capable of inspiring relational methodological approaches. Based on a small-scale study of Marian statue devotion in Spain, the article asserts that ‘personhood’ as an approach is an appropriate conceptual and methodological tool with which to frame theoretically, address, and approach practically the religious objects that researchers encounter in the field. Such approaches are considered here as ‘relational’, as lived religion is best understood through the intimate relationships and negotiations that take place not only between religious group or community members, but also between human persons and other than human persons such as religious statues. Acknowledging that researchers and the objects being researched can bring each other into varying forms of personhood carries the possibility of expanding the ‘participant observer’ paradigm, thus expressing lines of possibilities for understanding the volatile relational phenomena that take place in the religious ‘worlds’ of others.     

Managing religions: state responses to religious diversity

After 9/11 there is a general sense of the crisis of liberalism and secularism, and the need for greater security and surveillance. Diasporic Muslim communities have been increasingly the target of government interventions and investigations, resulting in various forms of governmentality that in fact constitute a ‘management of Muslims.’ The traditional strategies of benign neglect have been replaced by periods of intense governmental activity. The idea of ‘managing Muslims’ is often disguised by a more neutral terminology such as pluralism or multiculturalism. This article examines two versions of the management of religions from policies of ‘upgrading’ or retraining of Muslims for modernity to more robust policies of containment, rendition and seclusion. The result of securitisation and globalisation is the rise of a new type of society that I call ‘the enclave society.’ In such societies governments are creating new policies of ‘enclavement’ to quarantine communities that are undesirable or unwanted or dangerous. The mobility of a global society is now being constrained by encirclement and enclavement through building walls, ghettoes, catchments and no-go areas. Such policies are likely to be counter productive, requiring an escalation of draconian interventions.     

Politics and religion beyond state borders: the activity of Spanish MEPs on religious issues

This study examines the interplay between the political and religious factors in the activity of Spanish members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in their work within the European Parliament (EP). First, we explore the impact of Spanish MEPs’ religious preferences and ideological beliefs regarding religious affairs on their parliamentary activity. Second, we analyse the parliamentary activity of Spanish MEPs (parliamentary questions and motions for resolution) related to religious affairs. We argue that the rapid and profound process of secularisation in the Spanish population is also observable in the stances of MEPs towards religious affairs. Most of them perceive religious issues as belonging to only the private sphere, and do not consider that their personal religious affiliation and preferences should play any role in their political activity in the EP. The analysis also shows that religion is mainly addressed in an indirect way in the EP and is not a central concern on the agenda. We conclude that despite the fact that religion plays a minor role, the analysis of the activity of Spanish MEPs permits us to detect an affinity between ideological and religious positions. Therefore we argue that the religious cleavage that has characterised the history of Spain, despite having lost its historical strength, is still detectable in the activity of MEPs: right-wing parties are defenders of the values and interests of the Catholic Church within the EP, while left-wing parties have a more secularist agenda and use the EP as an arena to denounce the privileges and attitudes of the Catholic Church in Spain.     

Consulting and compromising: the (non-)religious policy preferences of British MEPs

The UK provides an important case study when analysing the influence of religious attitudes and values on political behaviour in the European Union. Our research shows British members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to be relatively at ease working with the different faith-based organisations (FBOs) which seek to influence the European policy process – and much more so than many of their colleagues from other member-states. This can potentially be explained by the more ‘pluralist’ political culture which is prevalent in the UK, and can also be related to the comparatively high rates of non-church attendance among the British sample which facilitates their even-handedness towards different groups. This, in turn, produces a resistance to allowing religious factors to disproportionately influence European policymaking.     

Social capital and religious and civic participation in Riga,Latvia: findings from the 2014 social survey

The article discusses the link between religious and civic participation in Riga based on the data obtained from a social survey in 2014. Religious and civic participation is a prerequisite for building social capital within a local community. Four types of relationships between civic and religious engagement have been identified: (1) individuals with no religious or civic activity; (2) religiously active individuals with no civic activity; (3) individuals involved in civic activities but who are religiously inactive; and (4) individuals involved in both religious and civic activities. Although the survey data indicate a weak correlation between civic and religious activities, religiously active individuals are more likely to be involved in civic activities.     

From unity to atonement: Some religious correlates of Hans Loewald's developmental theory

Loewald's understanding of ego development offers a way to conceptualise, from a psychoanalytic perspective, those aspects of religious experience that can reflect or contribute to the enrichment of the ego, in contradistinction to the defensive and regressive elements of religious experience that have been well detailed in the psychoanalytic literature in the past. In Loewald's view, a dynamic and metabolic interplay between ego and reality characterises the developmental process. With increasing levels of internalisation, differentiation, individuation and integration, ego and reality are restructured into increasingly resilient and durable forms. An ongoing dialectical tension between separation and reunion provides the driving force for development. Loewald's emphasis on the synthetic rather than defensive aspects of ego functioning forms the basis for his characterisation of sublimation as a 'genuine appropriation' rather than a defence, thus opening up one way to understand non-defensive aspects of religious experience from a psychoanalytic perspective. In the course of this exploration of Loewald's view of ego development and its implications for an understanding of religious experience, the author offers perspectives on Freud's views of religion, on some extreme forms of religious fundamentalism, and on the dynamics of 'mature' faith as illuminated by Loewald's developmental theory.     

Interventionist Secularism: A Comparative Analysis of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (1923–1928) and the Indian Constituent Assembly (1946–1949) Debates

The debates in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (1923–1928) and the Indian Constituent Assembly (1946–1949) inscribed the secular infrastructures of these states into law. A close examination of these debates shows that while the separation of religion and state was an important aspect of Turkish and Indian secularisms, both allowed the state to intervene in the religious sphere. In both, state intervention in religion sought to transform the majority religion into a secularized and modernized form that would complement national identity. However, whereas Turkish secularism adopted “restrictive intervention,” which sanctions state interference to construct a monolithic national identity, the Indian nationalist leaders adopted “emancipative intervention,” which seeks to create an overarching national identity while preserving the cultural and religious diversity of society. While the former type of secularist intervention limits religion's public visibility and places it under state control, the latter seeks to eliminate and reform religious practices that hinder social justice and equality. Based on this analysis, I argue that secularism may be seen as a tool state authorities utilize in the service of the political project of creating a modern nation.     

The Social Context of Organized Nonbelief: County‐Level Predictors of Nonbeliever Organizations in the United States

Many recent social scientific studies have noted that the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation is on the rise, but few have examined the nonbeliever organizations that some of these “nones” might join. This study uses an original data set, the first attempt at documenting the population of local nonbeliever organizations in the United States, to explore where these groups are more likely to flourish. Though one might assume that less religious counties, as measured by the percentage of those with no stated religious affiliation, would be more likely to contain nonbeliever organizations, this article provides evidence that they emerge more frequently and in greater numbers in counties with proportionally more evangelical Protestants. The percentage of evangelicals among a county's population is strongly associated with both the existence (dichotomously coded) and the number of nonbeliever organizations, even when controlling for a range of demographic and institutional factors.     

Switching from competition to sharing or cooperation at large response requirements: competition requires more responding

Two pairs of high-school students matched-to-sample for money. On each trial, a subject could either respond on one lever to take the matching-to-sample problem himself (taking response) or respond on a second lever to give the problem to his coactor (giving response). The first subject to complete the response requirement determined the distribution of the problem. Competition maximizes the amount of responding over trials, i.e., both subjects make taking responses on each trial. Sharing and cooperation minimize responding: only one subject makes a taking response (sharing) or a giving response (cooperation) on each trial, and the subjects alternate responding such that there is an equitable distribution of responses and reinforcers over trials. Large increases in the fixed-ratio response requirement to distribute problems produced: (1) a switch from competition to sharing or cooperation, (2) the expected concomitant change from inequitable to equitable distributions of reinforcers, and (3) a reduction in the amount of responding for three of the four subjects. Previous animal research has shown that large response requirements may have aversive properties. Switching from competition to sharing or cooperation at large response requirements allows a reduction in responding and, at the same time, a moderate number of reinforcers for each subject.     

The im-materiality of urban religion: towards an ethnography of urban religious aspirations

In recent years, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have engaged in the study of urban religion. Taken together, these studies form a paradigm that intertwines (1) the politics of belonging, (2) regimes of space and territoriality, (3) materiality and sensorial power and (4) visibility. We argue that while scholars have conceptualised these aspects in very nuanced ways, there is a need to address in a more rigorous way immaterial dimensions of urban religion. We encapsulate these immaterial dimensions in the notion of ‘urban religious aspirations’, meaning the multiple ideational sources that underpin people’s religious investments in urban life. We illustrate the relevance of studying aspirations with an ethnographic example of two Hong Kong Christian women and their involvement in the Umbrella Movement. Exploring their narratives demonstrates the need to take immaterial aspects of religious life into account when researching urban religion, especially in contexts where the distinction between the religious and the secular is less clearly defined.     

Blogging while gay and Christian: Andrew Sullivan and the production of the religious,secular, and sexual

This article examines blogger and political pundit Andrew Sullivan's performance of gay Christian identity through his weblog, The Dish. Through a reading of the repetitive and collaborative nature of The Dish as a medium of cultural production, I argue that Sullivan's gay Christian performance is made legible by how the religious and secular are articulated and negotiated through the site of the body in American culture. Sullivan's performance both reproduces and resists religious and secular normativities while at the same time produces a singular identity with distinct political and social advantages. Among other advantages, examining how the religious and secular are articulated through everyday discourse and embodied performance exposes some of the political investments in this articulation and provides a space to consider the stakes of scholars' own investments in ‘secular’ knowledge.     

The implication of technology in mediatisation and mediation approaches to religious studies

This paper investigates the groundwork upon which the concepts of mediatisation and mediation were erected, focusing on the very definition of what media-technology is. These concepts frame the conversation among scholars in the study of religion and media. However, despite the fact that the two keywords share the same root, media, they are understood as incompatible with one another. On the one hand, mediatisation is broadly defined as a historical shift in which the logic of mass media transforms traditional forms of religion, subsuming them under the imperative of the modern marketplace. On the other hand, scholars studying the mediation of religion affirm that media have always shaped and transformed religious practices. This investigation argues that the controversy between the two modes of analysis does not consist of whether or to what extent media technology affects or transforms religion. Rather, the conflict arises from how media technology is defined.     

Religion and the decision to donate organs: Exploring the potential role of religious leaders

The two‐step flow model of communication (Katz, 1957 ) suggests opinion leaders obtain critical information from the mass media and, in turn, communicate this information to interpersonal contacts such as friends, family and co‐workers. It is suggested that religious leaders (RLs) may serve as opinion leaders on the topic of organ donation by debunking donation myths, promoting donation during worship services, or communicating the benefit of donation to families faced with the opportunity to participate in living or cadaveric donation. The current study examined the personal knowledge, experiences, and willingness to communicate about organ donation in a sample of RLs (N = 59) in Rochester, New York. Structured interviews were conducted in summer and fall of 2009 with a random sample of RLs. Results indicate a disparity between RLs' expressed personal support for donation and their engagement in donor registration. Approximately one‐quarter of RLs have spoken about donation during a religious service and many indicate their knowledge is not sufficient to discuss organ donation in detail. Results elaborate on how RLs may be trained to serve as opinion leaders in the promotion of organ donation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A response to the proposed ELCA inter‐religious policy statement

In this solicited essay, an undergraduate Interfaith Scholar and Interfaith Studies minor at Concordia College responds to the ELCA proposed interreligious policy statement. In this essay, I will contend that the policy statement beautifully articulates our Lutheran commitment to accompany our neighbors by envisioning a world in which God celebrates all forms of diversity. Moreover, by framing our vocation in the context of relational theology, the document lays the groundwork for mutual understanding that prioritizes service to the neighbor over proselytization.     

Reflections from a damaged discipline: Adorno,religious radio,and the critique of historical reason

The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses (Adorno, 2000) echoes Adorno's analogous critique of the culture industry by detecting an ideological effect, prior to any given content, intrinsic to the form of radio religion. Notwithstanding the text's narrowness, I argue that Adorno's analysis of Thomas' ‘fait accompli technique’—presenting claims as previously established certainties—was both typical of his work and insightful for issues in cultural criticism. First, it refused subjectivist reductions of sociological effects to false consciousness. Second, it warned that historicism runs the risk of repeating the fait accompli when it treats what exists empirically as the only possible reality, or when it treats empirical givens as representatives of a future redemption. I argue that Adorno's dismissal of religious radio was consistent with his critique of positivism, and that the Thomas study models an historicist methodology that refuses, against its own logic, to reduce otherness to its own categories.