Stimulus Paper – Craig Calhoun: Religion, the public sphere and higher education; Tariq Modood: ‘We don’t do God’? the changing nature of public religion
When I was growing up in South Wales in the 1970s/80s, I regularly attended the local Anglican church. My father had been raised as a Welsh Congregationalist but had been confirmed in the Church in Wales as an adult because my mother was Anglican. Her childhood had been spent in a hamlet in rural West Wales, in which there was a handful of houses, a disused quarry and a church – she had no other choice. Even though we were an Anglican family, I always viewed the nonconformist chapels in Wales as signifiers of Welsh identity and through which, many expressions of Welsh culture were sustained and developed (for example, the Welsh language and choral singing) – the Anglican churches seemed to be more associated with our English neighbours.
I was thinking of how I connected identity with Christian places of worship whilst reading Professor Craig Calhoun’s paper, Religion, the public sphere and higher education (2015). Calhoun states that “a vague sense persists that ‘we’ British are Christian – and this doesn’t change when the ‘we’ is narrowed to English, Scottish, Northern Irish or Welsh.” However, he describes the growth in prominence of multiple religions in the UK and cites Michael Keene’s GCSE Religious Studies: Religion in Life and Society Student Book (2002), which claims that the UK is more of a multi-faith state than any other in the European Union. Both Calhoun and Professor Tariq Modood, in the accompanying paper, ‘We don’t do God’? the changing nature of public religion,propose that religion plays a significant part in public life, “in relation to ethical voice, social wellbeing, cultural heritage, national ceremonies and national identity” (Modood 2015). The place of the Anglican church within British society is visibly manifested through its historic buildings as signifiers of culture, the figure of the Queen as its head, its royal weddings and funerals, services of national remembrance, the broadcast of daily services or the pronouncements of clergy and bishops on the moral and ethical issues of the day. Modood suggests that people can still identify with the idea of a ‘national church’ despite not being members or believers in its doctrines but how do we create a society where peoples of all faiths and no faith feel that they have an equal stake?
My father attended the Church of England National primary school in the largely chapel-going, Welsh speaking mining village in which he grew up in the 1940s. It was funded by the church and local landowners and students would be expected to learn through the medium of English and conform to certain ‘British’ (English), Anglican standards and sensibilities. The Anglican church and gentry were providing educational opportunities for local children so long as they conformed to the norms of the dominant culture and the established church.
Tariq Modood describes the opposition the concept of multiculturalism has attracted in recent years, but he points out that its policies have not been reversed. Multiculturalism embraces and accommodates difference and recognises the idea that minority peoples need to feel included in public life without having to conform to the norms of the majority. He writes: “there could be said to exist a ‘multiculturalist sensibility’: a multiculturalist approach that has been extended from what we might call ethno-racial diversity to ethno-religious pluralism.” Rather than a dominant national church or a strictly secular society, the diversity and richness of the multiple faiths (and of humanist or secularist positions) that make up society, should be recognised and celebrated. Idealistic perhaps, but as Madood argues, multiculturalism requires activesupport for difference and the active discouragement of intolerance – “the re-making of the public sphere in order to fully include marginalised identities.”
Craig Calhoun concludes his paper by reminding us that religion is a concern for Universities because faith is important to many of our students and it can shape their relations. Since religion plays a part in public life, so it is reflected in the public programmes we teach. “Religious identities are only partly about religion” Calhoun writes, and we should recognise and embrace the rich and diverse beliefs, rituals and ethno-religious affiliations of all of our students with care and empathy.