Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T12:53:19.583Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Liberal religion and illiberal secularism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

By
Linda Woodhead
Edited by
Gavin D'Costa ,
Malcolm Evans ,
Tariq Modood  and
Julian Rivers
Gavin D'Costa
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Malcolm Evans
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Tariq Modood
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Julian Rivers
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Get access

Summary

You are at liberty to seek your salvation as you understand it, provided you do nothing to change the social order.

Attributed to Josef Goebbels

The way in which recent conferences about religion and politics have been framed reveals hidden assumptions: ‘Religion Confronts the Secular State’, ‘Is Religion Compatible with Liberal Democracy?’, ‘Post-Secular Conditions: Challenges to Citizenship, Law, and Democracy’. Such titles lend support to a widespread view that secular states are the norm, and that they are being challenged by a recent ‘resurgence’ of (illiberal) religion, a development which threatens to shift religion from the private to the public sphere, and in doing so raises urgent new questions about whether liberal-democratic states and societies can or should accommodate the unexpected intruder. This chapter questions every one of these assumptions: that religion was ever separate from the modern state, politics and public life; that religion and liberalism are inevitably at odds with each other; and that secularism has a more constitutive relation with liberalism than religion. For the sake of brevity, examples are taken from the British situation, but the argument applies more widely.

Let me begin by sketching what I mean by liberalism. First, I mean something wider than ‘liberalism’ as it appears in those political theory textbooks where it is presented as a political ideology alongside conservatism, socialism, Marxism and so on. This is a bloodless abstraction of liberalism: detached from history, institutional embodiment, compelling symbolic forms and social life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Religion in a Liberal State , pp. 93 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ammerman, N. 1997. ‘Golden Rule Christianity: Lived Religion in the American Mainstream’, in Hall, David D., ed., Lived Religion in America. Toward a History of Practice. Princeton University Press, 196–216.Google Scholar
Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Bader, V. 2007. Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity. Amsterdam: IMISCOE/Amsterdam University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balangangadhara, S. N. 1994. The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Barley, L. 2003. ‘Believing without Belonging’. Research and Statistics Department, Archbishops’ Council, London. Unpublished lecture handout.
Beckford, J. A. and Richardson, J. T. 2007. ‘Religion and Regulation’, in Beckford, James and Demerath, N. J. III, eds., The Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Angeles, Los: Sage, 396–418.Google Scholar
Bettenson, H., ed. 1989. Documents of the Christian Church. Oxford University Press.
Birdwell, J. and Litter, M. 2012. Faithful Citizens: Why Those Who Do God, Do Good. London: Demos.Google Scholar
Cantwell Smith, W. 1962. The Meaning and End of Religion. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Cavanaugh, W. 2009. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawson, L. L. 2006. Comprehending Cults: The Sociology of New Religious Movements. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
de Tocqueville, A. 1988. Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George and ed. Mayer, J. P.. New York: Harper Perennial (first published: vol. I, 1835, vol. II, 1840).Google Scholar
Dunn, J. 1979. Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eccleshall, R., Geoghegan, V., Jay, R. and Wilford, R. 1984. Political Ideologies. London: Hutchinson.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elias, N. 1978. The Civilizing Process. The History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Frye, N. 1982. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Ginzberg, L. D. 1990. Women and the Work of Benevolence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, S. 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Heelas, P. and Woodhead, L. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hitchens, C. 2007. God is Not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything. London: Atlantic Books.Google Scholar
Kamrava, M., ed. 2006. The New Voices of Islam. Reforming Politics and Modernity: A Reader. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.
Kopf, D. 1979. The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kurzman, C. 1998. Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McGoldrick, D. 2009. ‘Muslim Veiling Controversies in Europe’, in Neilsen, J. S., Akgönül, S., Alibašić, A., Maréchal, B. and Moe, C., eds., Yearbook of Muslims in Europe. The Hague: Brill, 427–75.Google Scholar
McLeod, H. 2007. The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, M. 1993. The Sources of Social Power, vol. II, The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1760–1914. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marsden, G. M. 1982. Fundamentalism and American Culture. The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870–1925. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marsden, G. M. 1987. Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.Google Scholar
Marsden, G. M. 1991. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.Google Scholar
Martin, D. 1992. Does Christianity Cause War?Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, D. 2002. Christian Language and its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding. Aldershot:Ashgate.Google Scholar
Marty, M. and Appleby, R. S., eds. 1991. Fundamentalisms Observed. The Fundamentalism Project 1. University of Chicago Press.
Marty, M.Appleby, R. S. 1993. Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education. The Fundamentalism Project 2. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Marty, M.Appleby, R. S. 1993. Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Politics, Economies, and Militance. The Fundamentalism Project 3. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Marty, M.Appleby, R. S. 1994. Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements. The Fundamentalism Project 4. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Marty, M.Appleby, R. S. 1995. Fundamentalisms Comprehended. The Fundamentalism Project 5. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Murdoch, I. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M. 2008. Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Liberty. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
O’Beirne, M. 2004. Religion in England and Wales: Findings from the 2001 Home Office Citizenship Survey. Home Office Research Study 274. London: HMSO.Google Scholar
Okin, S. M. 1999. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Okin, S. M. 2005. ‘Multiculturalism and Feminism’, in Eisenberg, Avigail and Spinner-Ialev, Jeff, eds., Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity. Cambridge University Press, 67–89.Google Scholar
Plant, R. 2011. ‘Religion, Identity, and Freedom of Expression’, Res Publica, 17, 7–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riis, O. and Woodhead, L. 2010. A Sociology of Religious Emotion. Oxford University Press.
Rummel, E. 2006. Desiderius Erasmus. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Smith, J. Z. 1988. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Song, R. 2006. Christianity and Liberal Society. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stringer, M. D. 2008. Contemporary Western Ethnography and the Definition of Religion. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, R. 2009. Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Walzer, M. 2006. Law, Politics and Morality in Judaism. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Woodhead, L. 2004. An Introduction to Christianity. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodhead, L. 2009. ‘The Muslim Veil Controversy and European Values’, Swedish Missiological Themes, 97, 1, 89–105.Google Scholar
Woodhead, L. and Catto, R., eds. 2012. Religion and Change in Modern Britain. Abingdon: Routledge.
Woodhead, L. and Heelas, P. 2000. Religion in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×