Introduction

The preceding chapters have explored controversies that attend faith involvement in a liberal public realm; policies that provide its parameters, both endorsing a religious presence and sometimes circumscribing it; and practices of ‘public faith’ in various settings and sectors. This concluding chapter explores key themes emerging from the earlier contributions.

Must faith be ‘other’?

The central question remains as to whether ‘faith’ is legitimate as a public category at all. ‘Strong’ secularists argue for the exclusion of religion from the public realm and its confinement to private life. A model of progressive secularisation informs this position, in which the Western liberal Enlightenment steadily marginalises religious institutions as historical curiosities, without social resonance, purpose or legitimacy. Thus, both ‘religion’ and religiousness become increasingly ‘other’.

The concept of the ‘other’ is an expression of the colonialism associated with the Enlightenment, a process that identifies cultural ‘essences’ and works with binary opposites (Sandercock, 2003; Baker, 2007). Associated particularly with forms of ethnic categorisation, ‘otherness’ and the process of ‘othering’ can occur across other strong binary divides, such as that established by many religious and secular positions. It is this latter construction that is problematised here.

Yet, as Dinham and Lowndes observed in Chapter One, debates on secularisation are far from resolved. Even in Western Europe, religious faith finds significant, persistent and diverse expression (Davie, 1994; Norris and Inglehart, 2006). At the same time, the rise of religious fundamentalism certainly presents a perplexing and frightening ‘other’. Gray (2007, p xvii) crystallises this development in arresting terms:

‘Whereas Enlightenment thinkers believed religion would in future wither away or become politically marginal, at the start of the twenty-first century religion is at the heart of politics and war’.

Against this ‘othering’, a great weight of public religious expression is embedded both within society and in the psychosocial self. Some of this is subconscious – a sort of ‘deep structure’ that quietly informs the public realm. Where it is conscious it is not typically constructed as dramatically and violently ‘other’. In Chapter Eleven, Chapman identified religious participation as a longstanding and continuing motivation for diverse forms of social service and political engagement. O’Neill's Canadian data in Chapter Seven suggested that the many who now practise a personal spirituality, not necessarily related to a major religious tradition and institution, are active in public life.