Why do we need to re-imagine religion and belief?

Why re-imagine religion and belief? What's wrong with how we think about them now? This is the question at the root of this volume, made pressing by a greater visibility of religion and belief across the public sphere than for a generation, and a public policy freneticism about it that has been largely preoccupied with sex, money and violence (Dinham and Francis, 2015). Policies abound about inequality, cohesion, extremism, migration, abuse and unethical investments. These are reflected and sometimes magnified in media representations of dangerous Muslims on the one hand and marginalised Christians on the other (Lovheim, 2013). A lack of religious literacy has been one way of looking at this – observing a public sphere that struggles to cope with a growing diversity as well as visibility of religion and belief in every sector and setting (Dinham, 2017). How has this come about?

A combination of old binaries and powerful paradigms is critical to the explanation. They reside in academic disciplines and are reflected in policy norms that may have run out of road. The conundrum is that they no longer equip us for the challenges that are faced – of super-diversity, extremism and the continuing role of faith groups in the provision of increasingly critical social services.

The dominance of the secular paradigm is foremost, and is arguably Sociology's greatest success. It is at the root of Western difficulty with talking about religion. There appears to be a widespread and deeprooted assumption at large that religion and belief are essentially in decline and likely to disappear. Nuanced and contested though the notion really is, this ‘vanishing point’ perspective of secularity informs much of what schools and universities teach, and how professions and leaderships practice, as the chapters that follow unpick. Yet as critics have noted, simple decline is too simple a tale. People are ‘believing without belonging’ (Davie, 1994), as well as the inverse of ‘belonging without believing’ (Hervieu-Léger, 2000). At the same time, a deformalisation is observed that detaches people from institutions and reveals religion and belief as subject to the same consumerist and marketised behaviours and choices as exercised in other walks of life (Woodhead, 2012). Most (84%) of the global population reports a religion or belief (Pew Research Center, 2012).