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.

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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 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

with an avenue to take action, where they felt all other action would inevitably

fail.

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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,

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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

2 N. Fraser. 2006. ‘Transnationalizing the public sphere’. Yale University,http://eipcp.net/transversal/0605/fraser/en3 (D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 14.)

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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

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

4 J. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Domain” European Journal of Political Philosophy.

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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

5 Kmiec, p18; Asad6 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

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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

8 N. Fraser. 2006. ‘Transnationalizing the public sphere’. Yale University,http://eipcp.net/transversal/0605/fraser/en9 Taylor, Charles. 2009. ‘The Polysemy of the Secular’ Social Research 76(4): 1143–66, E.K. Wilson, op cit

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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.

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

10 R. Wolin. 2005. “Jurgen Habermas and the Post-Secular Societies” Chronicle of Higher Education vol. 52, no. 5, p16

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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

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

11 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), pp66-9512 J. Habermas, ‘Religion and the Public Sphere’, pp8-913 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

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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

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.

14 Mavelli and Petito, op cit, p93115 L. Bretherton, 2010. Christianity and Contemporary Politics. London: Wiley-Blackwell, p15

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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.

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 16 S.Sassen. “Globalization or denationalization?” Review of International Political Economy vol. 10, no. 1 (2003); p7

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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

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

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“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

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-

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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.

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.

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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

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

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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.

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.

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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 faith-

based 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

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

17 Wilson, 2012. Op cit

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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

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

18 William E. Connolly. Pluralism. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005)

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“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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