Introduction

Having outlined some of the main themes and trajectories that have emerged from this interdisciplinary enquiry into how religions and beliefs are being theorised and researched across the Arts and Humanities, it is now time to reprise the main implications for the benefit of policy audiences and practice. These include the contested role of religion within modern liberal states; the problem of violence that emerges from both religious and secular forms of exceptionalism; increasing de-sacralisation of the public sphere in politics, culture and education; the struggle of legal and policy frameworks to address new diversities and subjectivities; growing interest in spaces, landscapes and geographies of religious and spiritual practice; engagement with the ways in which these intersect with new political and civic forms of engagement; the blurring but also hardening of both religious and secular boundaries and identities; the search for new forms of ethical engagement and participation; the need for new understandings of how modernity and religion coexist and how this shapes public policy; the importance of understanding the nuance and complexity of the secular identity as well as the religious; the need for a new imagination of the public sphere; and the challenge of reimagining religion and belief, not only after the secular but after the postsecular too.

It is not yet clear how we sustain a renewed policy discourse that might address these issues. Our evidence suggests that every move into a more open and holistic framing of what the experience of being complexly religious, spiritual and secular might entail can be hijacked by well-worn tropes, binaries and stereotypes. On religion, these usually revolve around polarities of the secular vs sacred, private vs public and ‘good’ vs ‘bad’. The challenge we have sought to address in this volume is to understand and respond to religion and belief in ways that engage with the ordinary cosmopolitan diversity they represent. The contributions in this volume suggest that a number of journeys are needed or are currently underway.

Going beyond the secular and postsecular?

Perhaps the biggest and most difficult is the journey from ideas of the secular and postsecular to a conception of public spheres – and people – as continuingly sacred and secular.