Public Religion Research Articles

PLURALISM AND INDIVIDUALIZATION IN THE ARGENTINE RELIGIOUS FIELD: CHALLENGES FOR CATHOLICISM IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS

This article analyses the changes in the modern Argentine religious field. Based upon statistical studies on beliefs and religious attitudes, we describe the consequences of secularization in Argentine society, the way in which people believe and practice religion, the changes in religious identification, the religious diversification process and the way in which the religious practices’ and beliefs’ level of institutionalization have been decreasing. In this framework, we trace the development of the complex relationship between the State, the politics and the Catholic institution. We focus particularly on Catholicism because it is the most prominently public religion in Argentina, the most powerful and the most influent on the State and political arenas.

Jürgen Habermas on public reason and religion: do religious citizens suffer an asymmetrical cognitive burden, and should they be compensated?

In his recent writings, Jürgen Habermas asks how the liberal constitutional principle of separation between church and state, religion and politics, should be understood. The problem, he holds, is that a liberal state guarantees equal freedom for religious communities to practise their faith, while at the same time shielding the political bodies that take collectively binding decisions from religious influences. This means that religious citizens are asked to justify their political statements independently of their religious views, resulting in a burden that secular citizens do not experience. To compensate, Habermas demands from secular citizens that they open their minds to the possible truth content of religion, enter into dialog and contribute to the translation of religious reasons into generally acceptable reasons. This article focuses on Habermas’s assumption that religious citizens suffer an asymmetrical cognitive burden that should be compensated, and his claim that his approach to religion in the public sphere is less restrictive than that of John Rawls.

Postsecularism as colonialism by other means

The claim that we are entering a “postsecular” age supposedly marks a new openness toward public religion, which was expected to wither as societies modernized. Similarly, postcolonial theory has attempted to think through the public resurgence of indigenous culture after the collapse of “Western” political regimes, which also predicted and prescribed its privatization. Drawing on the work of Partha Chatterjee, this paper argues that the “postsecular,” particularly as it is deployed by Jürgen Habermas and Alasdair MacIntyre, seeks to seduce religious believers and practitioners into just this same logic of self-colonization so that they might be recognized as defenders of an increasingly insecure, liberal nation-state against those who might seek to take advantage of its vulnerability.

The Transformation of the Argentine Catholic Church: From State Religion into Public Religion

The Transformation of the Argentine Catholic Church: From State Religion into Public Religion

The Unquiet Frontier

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.

Book Review: Global Pentecostal Movements: Migration, Mission, and Public Religion, written by Michael Wilkinson

Book Review: Global Pentecostal Movements: Migration, Mission, and Public Religion, written by Michael Wilkinson

Understanding the New Visibility of Religion

This article examines recent debates about the ‘return of religion’ to the European public sphere. It argues that there is widespread confusion between religion being more visible and religion having more impact on contemporary societies. The article asks what the 'new visibility of religion' means, how religion is contested and renegotiated in the public arena—or rather, in different publics—and what the effects of these struggles are on society, state and religion itself. It does so by providing an analytical overview five distinct approaches to the new visibility of religion: desecularization, de-privatization and post-secularity; the effects of ‘welfare utopianism’ on public religion; religion as a social problem; religion as expedient; and the mediatization or publicization of religion. The article concludes that what we are witnessing is a ‘secular return’ of religion, where religion is relevant for public discourse only by virtue of being either problematic or useful.

Holy transgressions: breaching the wall between public religion and patient care.

The stories in this collection can be described as stories of transgression. The writers have learned that public expressions of religious faith or reasoning are to be kept separate from the practices of caring for patients. Mixing the two is dangerous. Yet, as the stories indicate, many health practitioners cannot help themselves: their religion comes through, shaping their encounters with patients in all manner of ways. Religion comes through not as a distraction from medicine but as integral to their efforts to care well for their patients.

An American Sufism

The Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi order is a transnational religious organization. Founded by Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani (b. 1922), the order spread throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, and then to Britain in the 1970s. In 1990, Nazim’s student Shaykh Hisham Kabbani moved to the United States and established a branch of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order there. The past fifteen years have seen the emergence of this order as one of the most widespread and politically active Sufi organizations in America. In this paper I ask: Why and how is it that the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order effectively functions as a public religion in America? To answer this question, I will use José Casanova’s theory of public religion to understand why and how the order has developed and maintained a public profile in the United States. I contend that the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order’s public activity is rooted in: (1) the Naqshbandi order’s history of public significance in Muslim societies; (2) the order’s theological and practical appreciation of religious and cultural pluralism; (3) the order’s transnational character; and (4) its adoption of certain elements of American civil religion.

Introduction: Islamic Sounds and the Politics of Listening

Special Collection: Islamic Sounds and the Politics of ListeningIntroduction...Colectânea Especial: Sons Islamicos e a Politica de Audicâo Introducâo...(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In the course of the last decades, sonic forms of Islam - including sound, music, and the spoken word-have diversified and become publicly present through an increasingly wide range of new technologies. These include, for instance, the call to prayer (adhan) disseminated through loudspeakers, radio, and television; the circulation of Quranic recita- tions, sermons, and anasheed (Islamic hymns or chants) through audio- and video-cassettes, and more recently the Internet; as well as new, more often contested, musical genres, such as Islamic pop, country, rock, and rap music. The audiences for such musical sounds have also pluralized as Islamic performers today appear at multicultural festivals and religiously-mixed cultural events, in addition to targeting dedicated Muslim listeners. And mediated Islamic sounds more generally circulate widely today, sometimes on a global scale, far beyond the control of pro- ducers and performers.1 These sounds not only reach the ears of their intended publics, but also those of Muslims and non-Muslims that they do not target.2In this special collection, we discuss the effects of the public pres- ence of audible Islam by focusing on how Islamic sounds are produced, circulated, and listened to with different levels of intentionality by a wide variety of audiences in local settings where state and non-state actors manage religion in different ways. The individual contributions to this special collection all combine theoretical reflection on sonic Islam with substantial ethnographic fieldwork in Muslim-majority settings as well as in locations where Muslims constitute a religious minority.3 In her contri- bution, Jeanette Jouili focuses on the Islamically inspired artistic scene in France. She shows how ambitions to create a faith-sustaining artistic environment at times become entangled with civic projects that both aim to educate the largely working-class Muslim community to appreciate the arts, but also often seek to achieve a broader reach for their artistic projects. Focusing on rappers' stage talk at live festivals in Morocco, Kendra Salois analyzes how hip hop performers and audiences collec- tively co-constitute a counterpublic that seeks to shape responsible modern citizens rather than pious Muslims, without, however, being indifferent to Islamic ethics. Isaac Weiner, examining a 2004 dispute about the amplified Islamic call to prayer from a mosque in Flamtramck, Michigan, shows how attempts to keep the public sphere free from reli- gion paradoxically highlight the public presence of religion, while those in favor of multiculturalism and public religion tend to mute the specific religious character of a ritual, in this context the adhan. Brian Larkin, who explores the use of loudspeakers by religious actors in the city of Jos, Nigeria, points out how they are central to religious contests between Sufi and Salafi-inspired movements as well as between Muslims and Pentecostal churches. Rather than a tool to communicate a religious message, loudspeakers function as a mode of presence-making and a means to silence others.Before returning to these individual contributions and how they relate to each other, we briefly elaborate on two trends that have engendered a new interest in auditory Islam. First, we discuss the transformation and proliferation of Islamic soundscapes in the public sphere, and how this relates to the emergence and transformation of the Islamic revival move- ment and to the dynamics of the (secular) governance of Islam. Next, we turn to new theoretical perspectives that have stimulated scholars to engage with this greater auditory presence of Islam, in particular the renewed interest in anthropology of the senses and sensorial perception, and the turn in Islamic studies from a textual approach to focusing on the multiple ways in which Muslims live Islam. …

The U.S. Immigration Crisis and a Call for the Church's Lifeworld Politics: Why Should Hauerwas Collaborate with Habermas on the U.S. Immigration Crisis?

The U.S. Immigration Crisis and a Call for the Church's Lifeworld Politics: Why Should Hauerwas Collaborate with Habermas on the U.S. Immigration Crisis? Ilsup Ahn Introduction: Saying “No” to the State's Biopolitics Against the Undocumented Migrants According to the recent survey report published by the Washington, D.C.‐based Public Religion Research Institute, throughout 2013, there has been consistent bipartisan and cross‐religious support for creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the United States. While 14 percent percent of Americans support allowing undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents but not citizens, 63 percent favor providing a way for immigrants who are currently living in the United States without legal documentation to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements. They also discovered that nearly two‐thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. immigration system is either completely broken (34 percent) or mostly broken but working in some areas (31 percent). The report also shows that 41 percent of Americans believe immigration policy should be an immediate priority for President Obama and Congress, while roughly as many (42 percent) say it should be a priority during the next couple of years. Interestingly enough, only 14 percent of Americans say it should not be a priority at all. Despite the majority of the U.S. citizens favor some sort of comprehensive immigration reform, the Congress has failed to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul to date largely due to the House Republican leaders, who recently unveiled their principles for an overhaul for the nation's immigration laws. These principles, however, do not clarify whether most undocumented immigrants would ever be able to become legal residents or U.S. citizens, while they would require tighter border security and more interior immigration enforcements. These principles seem to reiterate the problematic anti‐immigration mantra to continuously militarize our borders as well as to criminalize undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration has been increasingly criticized in regard to the inhumane deportation of many undocumented people, especially those parents whose children are U.S. citizens. Critiques argue that President Obama has overseen record levels of deportations, with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) repatriating about 2 million undocumented people since he took office in January 2009 (roughly 400,000 a year or 1,100 per day). Amid the increasing political turmoil relating to the immigration reform, the public media begin to notice that the real winners in immigration control are the prison industry. The Atlantic, for example, reports that since 2003, when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was created and government crackdowns on undocumented aliens increased, private prisons have gained business, with industry profits more than doubling. Damon Hininger, CEO of CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), said during a conference call with investors in May 2010 that between 2007 and 2009, when earnings for the S&P dropped by 28 percent, the company's earnings drew by 18 percent. According to The Atlantic, the government spends more than $2 billion a year on immigration detention, while spending only $72 million on alternatives to detention. It also reports that the private prison industry, such as CCA, has spent more than $1 million on lobbying. Although private prisons say that their lobbying efforts are aimed at promoting their services, not shaping immigration policy, immigrant advocates argue that the private prison industry is always lobbying for more detention beds. Given that the cost of detaining an immigrant averages $159 a day and half of 34,000 beds are operated by private prison corporations, it is not difficult to see the connection between the interests of the private prison corporations such as CCA and the Geo Group and the criminalization of undocumented migrants. According to Lee Fang of The Nation, the controversial Arizona SB1070 was developed in consultation with private prison lobbyists through a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Unfortunately, as Aubrey Pringle reports, several pending immigration bills would increase the number of incarcerated immigrants even more. The ongoing political struggles related to the increasing border militarization, the widespread criminalization of undocumented migrants, and the massive deportation of undocumented parents are the explicit exemplification of what philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call the...

Annie Get Your Gun? Women, Guns, and the Tea Party

While the Tea Party’s emergence was rooted in the fiscal crisis of 2008, support for gun rights has become a dominant issue for the movement in wake of national gun tragedies that have sparked efforts to regulate gun ownership. In a notable twist, part of the new effort to defend the right to bear arms has involved women, who often invoke the desire to protect themselves and their families as the reason to defend gun ownership. In this paper, I first consider the “gendered” rhetoric used by Tea Party women to defend their right to bear arms through qualitative analysis. Then, I examine the extent to which such gendered appeals are likely to resonate with American women more broadly by examining the impact of sex on gun attitudes using national survey data from the Public Religion Research Institute.

Did the “War on Women” Work? Women, Men, and the Birth Control Mandate in the 2012 Presidential Election

Using a nationally representative data set ( N = 3,000), the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, we conduct multivariate regression analysis to determine the empirical impact of attitudes regarding the birth control mandate and abortion on presidential vote choice. We also conduct factor analysis to determine whether voters conceptualized the birth control mandate and abortion similarly. We find that support for the Obama administration’s birth control mandate was significantly related to voting for Obama for both women and men voters, although the impact was stronger for women. However, the impact of the “War on Women” rhetoric on voters’ choices was limited to the issue of insurance coverage for birth control rather than extending to the issue of abortion. Unlike attitudes about abortion, we find that voters conceptualized the birth control mandate less as a “culture war” issue and more as a “role of government” issue. Given this conceptualization of the mandate by voters, our findings reaffirm previous research that suggests that the gender gap in voting is largely driven by attitudinal differences regarding the role of government in providing social welfare benefits and equal opportunity for women.

The Post-Islamist Turn and the Contesting Visions of Democratic Public Religion

This article examines the relationship between religion and sociopolitical development in the context of the re-emergence of popular social movements in Muslim societies in the Middle East and North Africa. It makes a case that despite the decline of Islamism as a mode of social mobilization, religion maintains an active presence within the public sphere. Focusing on the religious-political discourses of Abdolkarim Soroush and neo-Shariatis, as the representatives of two distinct post-Islamist currents in post-revolutionary Iran, the article identifies some of the capacities and limitations of their particular conceptions of democratic public religiosity for contributing to the ongoing processes of change in Iran and other contemporary Muslim societies.

Religion, the Public, and International Order

The last two decades have seen massive productivity in literature tagged with generalized terms such as “religion,” “International Relations (theory),” “war,” “peace,” “order,” “culture,” and “secularism.” Scholars engaged with the role of religion in the public sphere have certainly been among the frontrunners bringing religion and culture back into social science conversations. However, most of these scholars are trained in disciplines other than genuinely “religious” or “political” studies. Most often, they are philosophers or sociologists. The works of Peter Berger (1999, 2008), or Jose Casanova's Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), are good examples of the impressive studies by sociologists of religion who have not been afraid to look across disciplinary boundaries. The large majority of the social scientists, particularly political scientists, however, jumped on the train of religious issues and international studies after 9/11. Among the books published over the last decade, there seems to be a note of partisanship to the disadvantage of certain world religions. While books written before 9/11 included a chapter on every world religion and conflicting issues (for example, Juergensmeyer 1994), among the books published over the last decade, there seems to be a note of partisanship, to the disadvantage of certain world religions. (Though, this may be only anecdotal evidence and, to be fair, the mass of literature on these topics is overwhelming.) What have been missing for a long time are systematic engagements with the conceptions but also practices of “religion” in the context of theoretical frameworks in IR. The Global Resurgence of Religion by Scott Thomas (2005) was among the first books to engage these issues, and there have been an increasing number of fine articles in various journals (case in point is issue 3:29 [2000] of Millennium). Other than that, only two self-claimed textbooks on the issue (Fox 2013; Haynes 2013) hold the fort on bookshelves. Widely acclaimed mainstream and policy-oriented books on the issue (Toft, Philpott, and Shah 2011), on the other hand, have increased social scientists' awareness of religion as an issue in their field. However, these shy away from applying various theoretical traditions to religious issues. International relations are more than simply the sum of foreign policies. Yet, when it comes to the study of religion in international relations this truism of IR theory tends to be ignored. Instead, scholarship has focused foremost on religion and foreign policy, and not on the complex interactions that characterize international relations. Thus, religion and international relations in theoretical terms is a rather uninvested field of research.

Public Religions in a Postsecular Era: Habermas and Gandhi on Revisioning the Political

An embedded ideology of the religious-secular binary in its various forms has assumed currency in recent continental and Anglo-American political thought. This ideology highlights the difference between religion under modernization, broadly defined by the secularization thesis, and that of religious revival in a period characterized by postsecularism. It reflects the rise of new epistemologies and the dissolution of the antinomies between faith and reason characteristic of a postsecular culture. A common argument found in these writings is that enlightenment secularization, which relegates the sacred to a private sphere, seems to have discovered its own parochialism as religion continues to provide…

Public Religion for and against the U.S. War Machine

Public Religion for and against the U.S. War Machine

Erratum

Journal for the Scientific Study of ReligionVolume 53, Issue 2 p. 457-457 ErratumFree Access Erratum This article corrects the following: Asynchrony in Attitudes Toward Abortion and Gay Rights: The Challenge to Values Alignment Michele Dillon, Volume 53Issue 1Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion pages: 1-16 First Published online: March 4, 2014 First published: 10 June 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12106AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat In the article by Michele Dillon in the January 2014 issue, the following errors were detected: The source for Figure 5 is “General Social Survey” (not Gallup). The source for Figures 9 and 10 is the Public Religion Research Institute (not “Public Religion Research Project Institute”). Color references for the figures can be better understood if the article is viewed online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.12096/abstract. REFERENCE Michele Dillon. 2014. Asynchrony in attitudes toward abortion and gay rights: The challenge to values alignment. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(1): 1– 16. doi: 10.1111/jssr.12096. Wiley Online LibraryWeb of Science®Google Scholar Volume53, Issue2June 2014Pages 457-457 ReferencesRelatedInformation

On the Edge of War and Society: Canadian Pentecostal Bible School Students in the 1940s

During World War II the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada put forth arguments on behalf of bible college students concerning military service exemptions, chaplaincy appointments, and veterans’ benefits. The paper deals specifically with the Rev. J.E. Purdie, Principal of the Western Bible College in Winnipeg, his efforts on behalf of his students, and one particularly complex case where attempts were made to have the student exempted from serving, and failing that, to have him appointed as a military chaplain. After the young man’s premature release from service, Purdie argued that he should be entitled to veteran’s benefits to pay for his bible college training. What initially appeared as a bid to protect the individual rights of one young conscript was in fact part of a much larger effort as Pentecostals asserted their right (and by extension the right of other marginal religious groups) to be included in the broader liberal framework in Canada. This case study is significant because it addresses themes of public religion, specifically how Pentecostals challenged the ‘liberal order framework,’ by attempting to carve out recognition for themselves among the religious groups that were acknowledged as legitimate players in Canada’s public affairs.

Public Religiosity, Religious Importance, and Substance Use Among Latino Emerging Adults

Objective: This study examined the relationship between religiosity (religious importance and public religion) and substance use (binge drinking and marijuana use) among Latino emerging adults. Method: Study utilized data (N = 2,442; 51.9% male) from wave 3 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Results: Only public religion was found to be a protective factor for both binge drinking and marijuana use. Conclusion: The study results suggest the potential for public forms of religion, such as attendance to services and activities, to act as a protective factor for substance use.