The Changing Nature of Religion in Today's World | LSE Festival

well good morning everyone welcome to the lse festival people and change Welcome to our live audience here at the London School of economics and Welcome to our audience online my name is James Walters and I'm the director of the religion and Global Society Research Unit who are delighted to host this event on the changing nature of religion in today's world part of our motivation in setting up that unit was to try and move on from a preoccupation in social science with one question about religious change which is whether religion is growing whether it's going away for a long time people just assume the latter which rendered all other questions redundant but it turns out that religion persists and it's taking new forms and connecting with politics and Society in good ways and bad so it remains I think one of the primary motivators to change in today's world and why it's so relevant to our theme this week to explore these issues we've got four incredible panelists I don't want to take too much time uh giving you their full biographies and they're all available on the website so briefly we have Professor Aaron Wilson from the University of greningen in the Netherlands who's recently published religion and World politics connecting Theory with practice we have Dr Georgia Bennett award-winning sociologist who has co-authored with Jerry white religious side confronting the roots of anti-religious violence we have Professor mukiligo Banerjee author of cultivating democracy politics and citizenship in agrarian India and she's part of our LLC home team and we have John Kasson CMG former British ambassador to Egypt and currently leader of lash UK we're going to have some discussion about the changes taking place in religion as a panel and then as usual there'll be a chance for you to put your questions for our online audience you can submit questions via the Q a feature please include your name and any affiliation and for those of you here I'll let you know when we open the floor please raise your hand and wait for the stewards with the roving mic to get to you and again please let us know your name and any affiliation and I'll try to ensure we have a range of questions both from our online audience uh and our audience here in the room so to kick off our discussion Aaron I want to come to you you've written an excellent overview of how we should be thinking about religion today and in your book you argue that we need to see religion in a more fluid shifting terms and those often used in political commentary so can you say a bit about how we should be thinking about the changing nature of religion yeah thanks for the the small question Jim that's great oh thanks to all of you for being here it's a real Delight to join you all for a Saturday morning conversation about this really fascinating topic um so for me I think um so the book was written a bit out of a little bit of frustration with some of the public conversations we have around religion so this this question that Jim talked about you know is religion growing or is it going away what do we actually mean by religion in that in that context what are we referring to and it strikes me that a lot of our public conversations around religion are played by three main problems and probably lots of others as well but I'm just going to talk about those three main ones and the first one is that it's quite singular um and that some people would also would call it even reductionist we just use this word religion as though it's all religious belief systems are the same we can all treat them in the same way we can measure them in the same way um and and it just ignores the plurality and diversity that's out there the second problem which is related to the first is a very imprecise what part of religion and religious practice are we actually interested in exploring um and and we're often not really clear about that so when we talk about Israel religion changing well which part of religion are we talking about um so that in Precision I think affects our public conversations as well and then the third problem is that it's very normative we have these conversations about whether religion is positive or negative and it carries these implicit judgments about religion's relevance and value and that kind of in some ways Mrs point I would say because whether you think religion is a good thing or a bad thing it's there it's part of the lived experience of people's daily lives in a whole range of contexts around the world so rather than trying to decide whether it's good or bad we should just acknowledge that it's there and then try to understand it in more nuanced ways and so then this is actually answering your question now after the setup um but so what I think we should be doing so so a short summary of that we tend to start with the the why and the how of religious change before we actually establish the what The Who and the where so and I think we should actually start with the where so we start with context what does religion what religion means differs from place to place and across different times so we need to First say where are we interested in religion and religious change and that's not just geographical sex spaces but also sectors of public life the second thing is who or which so which religion are we actually interested in and then even more precisely than that like which sect of nominational branch of that particular religion are we interested in um and then say what it is that we're interested in about religion are we interested in how religious leadership is changing are they interested in our institutions and then public role is changing are we interested in how people practice their religions and how that's changing um so we need to need to be much more precise about that also the relationship between religious and political identities and how that kind of affects what is happening in the public sphere so some of you might listen to that and say well we can't all be experts on on every single religion and no we can't and I don't neither am I saying that we should be what I think we should do is adopt this kind of set of questions around where who and what and answer those questions first then move on to the why and the how and so it's that sort of not becoming experts in every single religion but rather all of us having a set of questions that we go to whenever we encounter religion in the public sphere and then it's seeking to answer those first and I think that would just get us a lot further in our public conversations than than this sort of very singular reductionist imprecise and normative assumption driven idea of religion that we extend to currently cooperate with thank you Aaron it's one of the uh one of the Watts that you talk about is identity religion and politics how they're how they're entangled um and uh coming to you Georgia your book really confronts I would say the dark side of that when we have in groups turning on out groups and seeking to eradicate the religious other the religious minority um so can you tell us a bit about your book why and how the creation of a new moral and legal category that you call religiouside should change our thinking about and our response to anti-religious violence right and that probably is not a term that any of you have heard before and that's because it didn't exist but anti-religious violence is the fastest growing type of violence in fact a lot of other forms of violence are decreasing and yet there's a particular kind of anti-religious violence that has gone unnamed unprosecuted and undeterred and that's why my co-author and I felt that we would make an attempt to name it and the name we gave it was religious side religious side is a highly targeted form of violence it targets a particular religion and seeks out to completely eradicate it not only to eradicate its practitioners but to eradicate its habitats in sacred spaces and its entire cultural heritage now religious side has been around for a long time but there are a number of religious sides going on right now as we sit here religious sides in China against the uyghurs and the Tibetan Buddhists religious side in Myanmar against the rohingya we saw the religious side against the yazidis by ISIS and arguably the religious sides against native peoples in North America South America Australia elsewhere so one could go back to the Holocaust and perhaps that is the first modern religious side but one could ask the question how is it that these human rights violations are going on in the plain sight of all of us and yet the perpetrators are literally getting away with murder the murder of people and the murder of a religion and that's because there's nothing in international law that covers all of the elements of religious side there are pieces that are covered in various parts of international law but the International System just does not hold up when it comes to Prosecuting the perpetrators of religious side and what complicates it further is that it can be one religion against another religion such as what we're seeing in Myanmar Buddhists against Muslims it can be a State against a religion as what we're seeing in China or it can be a non-state actor against a religion such as what we saw with Isis and the yazidis so that makes a particularly important to mobilize other aspects of response to these crimes that we're seeing and religious leaders have a particularly important role to play in terms of a response because as much as the world's great religions are all about peace and caring for the stranger and love it's also within religion that we find the roots of hate speech and hate speech is where religious side begins and it's the point at which it is very important to intervene and how does that work it happens when one religion feels that it holds a monopoly on truth and that leads to apocalyptic thinking which divides the world into the children of life and the children of Darkness and once you divide the world that way it becomes very easy to demonize and dehumanize with hate speech and once you've dehumanized the other once you've turned them into a caricature filled with contempt it's a very very short step to violence thank you very much Georgia well um you write on India and your reason it was about democracy in India into the country not immune to these issues unfortunately um tell us about about how religion is changing in India how it relates to democracy so India is a is a test case ready for it's a perfect demonstration of what we've just heard um it is a place it's exactly I think understanding India is doing what everyone urges us to do which is to look at a context look at a particular religion in some depth because then you understand the Contours of that issue that can be then applied anywhere else this is how Anthology works that's what I'm that's what I do I'm an anthropologist now what's happening in India uh now there are two big aspects of India that most of you would be familiar with on the one hand it's the posters on the Underground India as incredible and they are the place of spirituality where yoga comes out and vegetarianism and so on uh the beautiful spiritual India where you see incredible acts of piety and devotion on the banks of rivers at temples and so on so everyday lived religious practice is very evident to any visitor to India the second thing is maybe what you would read in the financial times of the economists and the headlines of whatever newspaper you read where India's current government is now led by a political party that's self-evously believes in a religion in a in an ideology called hindutva foreign as is a political ideology but it's building on Hinduism as a religion and that's the majoritarian impulse which leads to religious side of religious minorities in particular the Muslims hindutva is not religion but it is taken on the god literally of the saffron Robes of Hindu monks and Saints and religious practitioners to forward what is a naked chauvinistic majoritarian ideology that aims to upend India's constitutional Vision as a multi-reliant religious nation which is what makes it so attractive to visitors and indeed who's a you know for Indian citizens who live there the Muslim people they are all religions of the world are found and then originate in India Christianity in India and predates Christianity in Britain by centuries so this is a place of all world religions um but the Muslim population is the largest and the most significant majority minority it's it's a population of 200 million people and this is the third largest national Muslim population anywhere in the world so it's larger than most Muslim nations so therefore the use of religion in the name of political ideologies what is happening in India and therefore it becomes really important for us to make sure that this is not about Hinduism it is the use of Hinduism for a particular political project and one interesting illustration of this there's actually in the news as we speak uh controversy raging about our film that's just been released which tends to represent you know India has famously 33 million gods and goddesses I don't know how they came to that number but we're told uh but importantly I think that we very routinely worship goddesses I do um but what is uh what is interesting in that pornography of uh these gods and goddesses and their ubiquitous their calendars there are statues the temples and paintings it is everywhere in popular art and In classical art but what has happened say with this one of these Gods Ram was very well known uh the hero of one of the two great epics the ramayana Ram was always depicted in Hindu iconography as a gentle calm person Always flanked by his wife Sita and his brother lakshmal and his best friend Hanuman so this was the iconography of Hinduism what political hindutva does is uses wrong as a rallying Pride for this political project and the literally the visual iconography of ram has changed such that he's now an isolated figure muscular and art historians have traces through through iconography he's become more muscular he's much more aggressively armed and all his attendant relationships or friendship of of marriage and and Brotherhood disappear so you become this isolated masculine figure who is fighting ostensibly for the pause of Hindus and this is then a signal for a certain mobilization of religion of a certain masculine chauvinism of the ideology of Hindustan which is what we see at practice in India all the time I should just say it before I end that there is also a very positive story about religion in India which I will come back to later with you invites thank you um so John I'm coming to you you went from being Ambassador in a country Egypt which also struggles uh with religious divisions but you now run a faith-based charity um someone if you want to say something about these contrasting settings and what conclusions it's LED you to draw about how religion can change individuals and Society yeah thank you hi everyone um I really worked in this conversation actually I'm really welcome the way that Aaron set it up for us because I mean I come to it as a practitioner I spent 20 years in government foreign policy um and I'm a person of Faith trying to operate in various worlds um and I I've been struck Jim sent me notices of that question a few days ago and I've been struggling to to think about it because it um religion in that big way and it doesn't seem much use as an explanatory category to reflect on my experience um so I really I really welcome the chance to think in a more precise specific contextual way about it and I suppose I started to think maybe there were four I four four words beginning with i that might help us give us sort of lenses into what we're thinking about so um and and Egypt illuminated in quite interesting ways so one would be identity um which was being talked about a lot already um and in each case it seems to me this conversation is working because it's acknowledging that religion is a very powerful fact and whatever we mean by return it's a very powerful factor in in this vector um in this case identity is a as a vector of power how power is mobilized politically and personally and also how power is resisted and um but it you know it's actually kind of more religious literacy and people think about power and politics is is really helpful but if you if you look at Egypt you immediately realize it's quite it's quite nuanced and religion interface with other things in a way that's quite hard to disentangle um and most Egyptians have overlapping identities as as Arabs as Africans as usually as other Muslims or Christians and as Egyptians and there's an important balance of power between those identities for Egyptians um and uh I would say the nation is the most powerful probably often the national identity for Egyptian as a part of a 5 000 year old Nation um and in that context actually religious identity for Muslims offering a kind of tan National solidarity um sometimes is an important balancing factor to the to the strength of nationalism which might be could be quite toxic um so you see a sort of solid pan-aram solidarity in a Muslim solidarity Palestinians um which can be a factor in Egyptian foreign policy but you also see it as a very toxic thing it was an attempt by Islamic State to mobilize pan pan Muslim and Islamic identity against Christians in Egypt so so the way it plays out can be very very toxic and can be an important resistance to very toxic things in that identity Vector if you like this is the second I would mention would be institutions um and again it's nuanced in Egypt because it's a very centralized state invented bureaucracy and then too taxation you know it's geographically fundamentally centralized the wage it works and the existence of Islamic institutions and church institutions but especially Alaska University is the seat of surely learning in the in the Sunni world alongside that very powerful authoritarian State um is is Nuance in some sense it's a potential source of pluralism in the Egyptian political context and an account balance to the state maybe in a way that in early modern European States you know in Lake Christendom the existence of church and state in in Balance to each other creative space of eventually for political pluralism on the other hand there's a constant dance of attempts to co-opt our Australian co-ops um Islamic scholarship um to the products and services estate but that then causes a reaction because it delegitimizes deed and gentamizes that Allah as the as the the body which can can articulate from Muslims what a Muslim approach is and it allows space for these reactions including the Very extreme islamist ones the Muslim Brotherhood or the or um Isis or others so there's a lens of identity as the lens of Institutions and there's a lens of ideas um you know the to look a bit more broadly in that region the way that um the ideas of Christian Zionism which are a very novel idea within Christianity within American Christianity have been have been mobilized in the in the Arab palestinian-israeli dispute uh is a very powerful example of how religious ideas can have real real world effect um but then of course religious ideas um can also be very sort of liberating uh resistance to to um damaging power structures and bring it very close to home the charity I work for now is all about building communities of mutuality for people with learning disabilities with intellectual disabilities and those are out and the I you know the fundamental idea we operate from which is that somebody who might have profound intellectual disabilities may not may not communicate with verbal speech um is a full person uh and it can live a whole full life and it's made in the image of golden Christian language is a powerful idea but it's in a way it's a faith position um which has to be contended for and lived out so I suppose that we I would sort of pick out Aaron's challenge to analyze what's going on in these vectors of power how it's used and how it's resisted identity institutions and um uh ideas uh to get more specific and what it tells me in my experience is a religion whatever we mean by that can be a very sort of uh liberating reality and exactly the opposite and in a way the corruption of the best can be the worst its power can be used in very damaging ways and sometimes the same idea the same institution the same identity can have both of those two edges so what really interests me as a practitioner and a person of faith is how do I use power and how do I live out by faith in a way that liberates me from it's simply becoming co-opted by whatever my narrow power interest is how do I have freedom uh to to to to to discern the difference between those the um those different impulses of this Paris is religious toxic or not toxic and so I would offer you a fourth eye to finish um which is a is sort of about interiority it's about the individual uh work of personal practice and and for communities to develop interiority together so how how my tires as a person operating within a faith tradition and operating with levers of power in government um achieve enough wisdom and character and internal awareness and eternal Freedom not to Simply verbalize identity and institutions and ideas um for that for narrow self-serving purposes for something that's more liberating and for me it's about it's about the practices which decenter us from our own communal interests our own institutional interests our own personal interest and for the practices that I've found powerful in that sense are one is one is interiority it's a practice of prayer as a practice of self-examination it's a practice of of understanding myself as part of something bigger that's more transcendently and if I could quote from the gospel of Oprah we are we are what we we become what we pay attention to so what are we paying attention to in our daily practice that might allow us to become more than just somebody is mobilizing the power of religion for self-serving purposes and it's quite a different gospel um uh actually what was it what I was going to say there but it's about the other practice as well as of interiority of personal religious practice it would be about where you choose to plant yourself um and where where we uh where we where we make our commitments where we make our relationships um shapes us and so I made a deliberate choice to not simply be trying to be at the top of government in the room where it happens because I thought that was shaping me into a certain type of person to develop more freedom I wanted to put myself with people who are marginalized and not doing things for them but being with them because I thought it might give me freedom to grow in a different way so the other gospel I wanted to quote was the Gospel of Leonard Cohen which is that the um the cracks are where the light comes in and the margin of replacing yourself outside your your senses of power your comfort zone uh with others across boundaries again it's a liberating fact which I fit so I think I think there is a possibility to find places to stand that let a bit of light in so you're not simply mobilizing religion in whatever ways it suits you not even aware that you're doing it but you can you can achieve the wisdom and character to operate with this this powerful thing um in a way that's a little bit more reflective and free objective and you said almost as a throwaway but it's going to take us away from you know this highly personal and back to the global when you were talking about state versus religion and you said that that makes room for pluralism that takes me back to the piece of West failure which of course was meant to resolve the religious wars in Europe and it created the concept of State sovereignty and we paid a price for that we're still paying a price for that because it's state sovereignty at the expense of the rights of the individual and it's precisely because of State sovereignty in that we are unable to intervene in religious sides and other forms of anti-religious violence because when you look at State sovereignty and if you look at the UN Charter unless a conflict unless human rights violations are spilling over into other states you cannot come in and intervene and it's very very important in terms of addressing anti-religious violence that we Elevate the rights of the person over the rights of the state and that along with the rights of the state come obligations of the state to deal with situations like this and and going back to what you were saying um I think we may be seeing the beginnings of a religious side in India because there is so much hate speech going on now and a lot of research has been done on how hate speech and the weaponization of language predicts violence the good news is that we're at a point where one can still intervene before it turns into a full-blown religious side so I just wanted to pick up on those two points I think we're we're sort of moving towards some questions around what how do we respond to some of these challenges what do we do about um this apparent rise in in more sectarian religious perspectives a fusion with um with with nationalism um if you want to comment on that from an Indian perspective and perhaps over more of the the the bottom-up perspectives that I promise to allow you sure thank you I think what's interesting with any religion is the what Max flavor would have called an elective Affinity but I think you know every religion has throws up the resources the imagination for a number of quite Progressive ideas right and I'm going to just quickly tell you how I see it in terms of its relationship to democracy this is not about that for religious nationalism it's about the values that you've required to create Democratic culture and what religion how religion shapes you as a person some sense of interiority now where I did fieldwork and over 20 years I kept going back to the same Village so I know this place really well a majority of the population is Muslim so that's what I study most closely and it's very interesting how Islam as a religion has the resources if you think of democratic values what are they there is a certain commitment to egalitarianism there is a commitment to redistribution of wealth so that there's a minimum standard of living for everyone there is a commitment to imagining a common good that is much larger than self-interest and if you think about Muslim religious practices it does that when you go to say your prayers on on a Eid day on a big Festival Day to a mosque you can't choose where you're going to stand to say your prayers you you stand where there is space you fill the next space so who you're standing next to and in a village where there is otherwise a lot of social distinction marked by caste by class by gender of course only men go this is a big distinction but that's it's a separate story but even amongst men there is a certainly galitarianism to the space of of Prayer qurbani which is the when cattle sacrifice or animal sacrifice is done on one of the two big eats we think about it and then in places like India where of course there's a demonization of of Muslims it's all about consuming meat and a sort of uh criminalization of of people as it's happened and actually if you look at qurbani the whole idea of sacrifice and idea of abrahamic sacrifices precisely to give up your most loved animal and in rural India people do live in this human animal economy so they do have favorite colors favorite Catholic that they offer for sacrifice and then the meat is really redistributed so where you know where I was it was very poor Village and just 11 families could afford to give up one okay for sacrifice and the rest of the Year everybody pretty much had a vegetarian diet because it was too expensive to eat fish or meat but on that day on Eve everybody in the village got to eat a little bit because most of the rules of sacrifice of qurbani is how many parts you can keep how many parts you give to relatives how many parts you give to people you're not related to and this is quite strictly observed and then finally I think there is uh my earlier work the earlier book which is called why they are both showed this that in India if you have to explain its Rising water turnouts if you get away from who people are voting for to why they're bothering to vote at all one of the things that you hear from people is of course you must vote it is free it is my duty as a citizen to broadcast a vote this idea of inviolent commitment which is what we said is really in our research across India did this with a team of 12 researchers is this idea of environment commitment often comes from religion if you fast on Fridays you fast on Fridays it doesn't matter if your best friend is getting married and there's a feast if you have to pass that day you do and this idea of invalid commitment comes and then finally I would say this is why the title of my book comes from which I think really relates to what all of us have been saying today is an idea of cultivation that you you cannot be religious so you cannot be spiritual by saying you are you've got to practice and a lot of practice and and prayer or fasting or whatever it is observances of different kinds is really about cultivating a certain self such that religion then becomes a sort of ethical resource it's not just about that religion it's about a set of ethics and predispositions that you take to other areas of life so thanks Wiggly you know I see what you've said about them all kind of Grassroots capacities of of religious cultivations relating a bit to what John was saying within Egypt as a counterbalancing to authoritarian nationalism and so forth um John I don't know if you you won't comment more on that but I'm curious to just come back perhaps to the top down because um freedom of religion has become a a an area of policy that particularly in North America and Europe has really grown in influence over the last few years and perhaps towards the end of your time in foreign office um uh and and I just wondered whether whether you see this and Aaron you also touch on this in your book so it will come to you is is this an effective tool for um for fostering the kind of religious morality and and freedom that we that we want hmm yeah I mean I I suppose I I'm someone wary of it because of its Origins I think it it um it often it's although it's you know it's it's articulating very welcome language of Rights is important uh rights that are well established um and need to be protected but it it's been it seems to me it's been mobilized often for in in the UK but particularly in North America for domestic political reasons it's not actually about the context it's being aimed at it's sometimes mobilized as part of the the kind of culture wars of religion against secularism in the west um uh and I think of I suppose I feel uncomfortable when a religion is is working very hard to defend its own rights against others you know as well as talk about with de-centering you know if it's all being used at the service of defending our boundaries of our in against the out the other outs I I worry that it it's not going to have the positive effect and you might hope for it but it's a good example of how I is the idea and institutional work there which can be important need to be defended but also it won't necessarily unless the it's accompanied by the sense of what what's what's what's the reason power and motivation that's that worked with it so um you know I think that I suppose I would say the juror is out in terms of whether it will have a positive effect in the in the global situations it's it's supposedly used for because it seems to be it's a lot of the the energy is about domestic identity Politics as much as it is about the foreign policy outcomes where it might be used Aaron I think you probably share some of John's reservations yeah um so I do a lot of work with um with diplomats and Society people and also people in the Defense Forces around these kinds of topics and I also encounter a lot of different academic perspectives on the right freedom of religion or belief and it's it's utility so there are sort of staunch Defenders and Advocates of Ford and there are people who say well Forbe is can play freedom of religion beliefs sorry yes freedom of religion I believe that um form is um like forbid is impossible because not because we can't decide what religion is so um and one of the things and this I think goes directly to what to what John was saying is that one of the the dangers is that external actors and particularly in foreign policy will mobilize this language of the right to freedom of religion or belief or like there is a transatlantic distinction the U.S will use religious freedom and the Europeans like to say freedom of religion or belief as though that makes it somehow less kind of cool has it has fewer connections with colonialism and Christianity by stealth which is often the perception of the religious freedom uh lobby but the reality from from our research we've done some research on perceptions of this right in India and Indonesia actually and um the reality is that people outside of the transatlantic don't make that distinction any kind of attempt by particular European and American powers to promote the right to form is inevitably viewed with a degree of Suspicion in most of these contexts um and so I think for people who and this isn't to say that we should ignore this right absolutely not that's not what I'm I'm saying but what I am saying is that sorry harping on my own research again we have we have to start with the context we have to understand what religion means for people in a specific place part of our research revealed that Grassroots organizations in Gujarat and India just avoided using the term religion and belief altogether because it actually means that people the Muslim people in their Community more of a target for violence than less and so instead they started talking about people left behind by development and they became the alliance for justice and peace rather than having any kind of reference to religion and so for that that is really like not appreciating the nuances of these terms in specific contexts can really have life or death consequences for people on the ground and that's that's why this matters so much and I think one other thing that John said that I just really want to emphasize is this question of power I have this conversation with my students all the time we get into debates of you know is is religion better or is secularism better I mean religion and secularism are like Assad said neither of those things actually exists but assumptions about them exist and they are the things we need to be interested in but they really come down to contestations of power and what we need to be looking at is who has power what are the sources of those power how are they using it and how is it being resisted can I just mention the the the experience of cops institutions because there's another context that so um in Egypt was probably perhaps 100 million people who perhaps 10 million have Coptic Christians who whose Roots as a community go back before the arrival of Israel think about 2000 years um and so they've lived for a millennium and a half as a minority uh religious minority under the deal of pressure in terms of their civil and political rights and quite often even up to today violence um but they have quite a rich uh and different discourse about their experiences and religious minority that that doesn't uh mobilize the language of Freedom religious belief uh in that in a way that we're using it in the west at the moment that there's a sense that um first of all to be to be defended by the Christian West as our guys is extremely unhealthful in their own context and it's not how to identify they don't find themselves anyway there's a sense that our calling and our identity is to endure minority status and pressure uh rather than to remove it um um and there's a sense that we would like to handle our own problems in our own way we would like to negotiate with a different state and the Islamic the Muslim Community that we live alongside in our own way and make compromises sometimes and stand up for ourselves sometimes uh rather than become part of a sort of single agenda that arises in a slightly different language outside and sort of global North Carolina I actually wanted to quickly pick up on something project said as well I'll be very quick um so one of the things JoJo was talking about States mobilizing religion and all and human rights against individuals and I think that's something we also see in the context of freedom of religion or belief you will hear States talking about their right to uh to their own religion as a as a way of resisting rights for women or rights for lgbtqi communities as well and you know Georgette made this point very clear individuals have rights and they they should be upheld over and above the rights of States so states have states do have rights in relation to other states but they have responsibilities when it comes to their own citizens and I think that's something we need to be aware of in this discourse and Aaron I wanted to pick up on the definitional issues that you were talking about uh interestingly enough in the U.S we somehow gotten around that and we've gotten around it in this way on issues for example of accommodation of religious practices religious needs in the workplace Title VII of the Civil Rights Act doesn't attempt to Define religion I mean you can't discriminate on the basis of religion but it doesn't try to Define religion what it does say is that you have to base it on sincerely held consistently practiced beliefs so belief it doesn't attempt to say well this isn't a religion that that is not a religion so it's it's an interesting take on that definitional issue yeah in practice that's also very interesting to see how that flies out I'm going to open to the floor um we've got very limited time this morning so I really am looking for concise questions and those features and I'll take a round of three which you can direct to one person on the panel or or see who wishes to respond um so so you had your hand up um uh first of all it will go to you and then we'll come to Christian uh and um and say your name and if you have an affiliation so yeah um you're on Grand time um a former law enforcement intelligence analyst I'm now effectively a journalist particularly reporting on the current war and and my question is for everyone based particularly on um Dr Wilson's book and her comments um how are the Western particularly Christian churches but Western religious groups and organizations based in a secular society adjusting to the weaponization of religion I would particularly refer to the three people who visited South Sudan a month or so back the moderator of the Church of Scotland the Archbishop of Canterbury and the pope visited together and I wonder if people in their organizations paid sufficient attention or see in getting in smile there of the Russian Orthodox Church ministering to some rather different people across the border in the Central African Republic thank you and we'll go straight to the back there please yes hi my name is Christian I'm a student here at LLC thank you all for your time my question is simple in the number of words but quite complex in this content but where do you draw the line between religion ideology and cultural identity and we see that in conflicts around the world so I'd be curious to hear your every everyone's Reflections from that thanks very much and then uh yeah hi um I'm Josh I am currently an re teacher at a secondary school in London um and I'm going to be doing Masters in sociology at LSC next year um I guess my question becomes kind of goes into more of the academic like world in the sense of when you look at religious studies and Scholars of religions and quite often especially when you look at anthropology or sociology they're no longer in sociology departments or anthropology departments I guess quite often they're actually within perhaps religious studies you know or religious studies and theology Department the best and my question is is it helpful or unhelpful that those Scholars are based in those departments that focus on religions is that helpful or does that mean that they're losing something from their immune discipline foreign can I just say something because you said you're a sociologist I'm a sociologist as well do you know how they Define sociology when I was a doctoral student the detailed study of the obvious but that toolkit allows you to do a lot of things so we've got a question about Western religious groups responses to um emerging violence with the exactly Sudan um a question about identity religion and ideology and culture which aeronauts if you want to speak to that and um and then something about the place of religion within the University who wants to kick songs Okay um in fact The Duchess on the virtual idea issue as well um yeah in in a lot of anthropology departments around this country at least the anthology of religion is absolutely Central to it we cannot imagine the teaching Anthology without teaching anthology of relationship for two reasons one is anthropology is a holistic social science we study all aspects of having human society and it would be frankly absurd to studying Any Human Society without religion that was one and just in the way that we teach economy and and kinship and marriage and politics you know those are the building blocks that that continues to remain the second thing is they are project religion actually learning something about people's idea of ritual of the Sacred of invalid commitment Etc from the anthropology of religion has been very important to theorize other aspects of human life so it has value Beyond understanding of religion what you were talking about there is it's not about understanding a religion from the inside unless there is a study that we are engaging with and of course we go beyond all religions we go across to all kinds of indigenous systems of thought with climate change discussions at the moment it's absolutely urgent to talk about human non-human interactions animism spiritualism Etc is it has taken on a different level of importance and urgency and really anthropologies of only discipline that has taken these systems of thought seriously but we're very clear what the limits are and when we when it is issues of Theology and faith uh there are limits to anthropological understanding and that's why we need people like Jim on the faculty at Tennessee as well um as a fellow traveler it's not as not political and therefore I think you know this sort of answers your question that to separate religious identity from cultural identity is is almost observed uh in some ways thank you um I mean do a quick round of all three questions so on the first question around um the weaponization of religion and um what I think you're describing there is a kind of religious diplomacy so yeah yeah very very much um I think there's there's a couple of I think it's absolutely political what is happening there um I think there's definitely um there's definitely an attempt to sort of signal uh where where the political landscape lies and the affiliations lie between the actions of those different actors and I think there is also some political diplomacy taking place via that religious diplomacy um and I think there needs to be more awareness of religious diplomacy and more kind of um maybe not liaison but you know at least more awareness of it within sort of conventional foreign policy outfits as well um on the the question about the line between religion I where do you draw the line I would say you don't um and again you have to go to context so you've got to understand what's going on this I'm sounding like a broken record but yeah I think and I and it shifts that's the other really important thing about this is once you kind of identify I don't think you can and disentangle them but I think you have to be aware that that landscape is constantly shifting um and then on the third question I think this is this is also something that that I encounter with with foreign policy departments as well like do you have a specific office of religion that specializes in religion or do you try and quote unquote mainstream religion and I think there's pros and cons to life so um I think having a specific religious studies Department in the in the academic context because people's assumption often is religion isn't really that relevant unless you are religious um it can be detrimental um so and and so part of you know I've been on the board of my faculty for a few years now and part of our challenge has been thinking about you know you have to work much harder to show people actually religion is relevant to what you do um so that requires some creativity from Scholars of religion to and to get past the idea that what we're doing is training priests and Sunday school teachers because we're non-conventional that's not what we do um but then the flip side of that is if you quote unquote mainstream religion then everyone kind of goes oh well we've done religion we know what it's a bit like mainstreaming gender we've done gender we all know about gender like we don't like Case Closed let's let's all move on and that's just not the case you've got to have this as with gender and religion you've got to have constant attention for these in the mix um just to do a short plug my book actually has a really helpful diagram in it to kind of help um understand this entanglement so feel free to it's it's available for free online feel free to check it out will come to you um yeah I think you as you and it was a good question um I'm afraid if I know enough about this precise situation you're talking about whether religion is being weaponized or being used as a disarming factor in those African contexts I suppose I would I would simply say um just as everyone was just saying that the diplomats and academics need the religious literacy I think religious leaders need a political literacy if they're going to get involved in this kind of thing um uh yeah and I think the thing for them to pay attention to that I'll go back to what I was saying earlier on about de-centering is is what they're doing entrenching the or the existing dynamics of conflict and the existing sense of in-out boundary or is it opening up opening up new opportunities to reframe it and reimagine it in terms of relationships across difference um because I think that's that's where they're bringing their specific the potential for offering a specific fresh asset into a diplomatic situation object so I'd like to take a practice of questions from a different angle um I understood at least part of your question to have to have to do with Intervention when religious in institutions religious actors intervene um 30 years ago I founded an organization the Tannenbaum Center for entry with misunderstanding and one of our signature programs is peacemakers in action and one of the things that we learned from all of the case studies that we did of our peacemakers is that there's a big difference between religious institutions and religious actors religiously motivated actors in the cases of Northern Ireland and Bosnia for example and the conflicts that were going on there the religious actors who intervened in these armed conflicts really had to operate outside of their religious institutions in the case of Northern Ireland um the IRA priest father Alex Reed and the loyalist paramilitary Reverend Roy McGee they were not at all supported by their churches they remember the name James Chesney remember everybody in the room should remember James Chesney so it's it's an interesting thing that in order to use your religious motivation for peacemaking very often you have to operate outside your institutions in terms of of the issue of religious identity ideology and culture I am so glad on what you reported about your research about Muslims in in the village and how consistent Islam can be with democracy and how egalitarian it is because we tend to confound the culture within which your religion is practiced with the religion itself and finally in terms of religious studies part of the work that we do at the Tannenbaum center with these peacemakers in action is we try to teach diplomats how to work with religious actors John I think you will agree that there has been a tremendous dearth of knowledge on the part of diplomats at our parents uh because it's extremely important for diplomats to understand the religious context at the same time we try to work with seminaries and other places where religious people are trained clergy or just people who want to enter their religious life in some other way because they need to be taught conflict resolution skills they need to be taught peacemaking skills because if you're going to be true to the values of your the core values of your religion you need to understand how to do that stuff so that takes us Beyond anthropology department of Sociology departments Etc thanks thanks Judith I've unfortunately been getting very strict instructions about not overrunning and we have just come to the end of our time so I'm pleased to say that we've got copies downstairs of mukulika and georgette's books and they're going to go down and sign copies for anyone who wants to buy them Aaron's book is available open source online I highly recommend it's really good teachings also special if those involved in education and she's also written a little summary on our religion and Global Society blog and you can read that blog post um so will uh at the end of the session we'll all go downstairs if you want to talk to any of the patterns that's that's where we'll be um but it just reminds me to thank you all for joining us both those of you here in the room and those online and please let's thank our speakers [Applause] and the speakers thank you thank you

Channel: LSE

Views: 814

Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics and Political Science, London School of Economics, University, College, LSE Festival, #LSEFestival, Religion, Change, secularisation, citizenship, Identity

Id: gPF3XXXY8jM

Length: 60min 55sec (3655 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023