Articles

The genesis of Turkish secularism dates back to the first half of the 19th century. Even before the establishment of a secular state in the early Republic of Turkey, the question of the relationship between religion and politics moved Ottoman statesmen and Muslim intellectuals. In this article, the main stages of this discussion are traced: from the emergence of Turkish secularism to the establishment of Kemalist secularism to the current religious policy of the Party for Justice and Development (AKP), which is illustrated using various current areas of tension. In spite of differences in content between the post-kemalist young Republic of Turkey and the ACP era, surprising parallels are also revealed.

Dreßler, Markus. "Erdoğan und die 'Fromme Generation': Religion und Politik in der Türkei." Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 9–10 (2017): 23–9.

The paper discusses the theme of the congress ‘Dynamics of Religions’ in the theoretical context of cultural evolution. In contrast to the prevailing progression model of culturalevolution, it proposes adiversification model thatallows for consideringthe dynamics of religions on the micro-level. In this view,a central element of cultural evolution is the dialectical relationship between cultural production and culturalenvironment,which is the outcome of culturalproduction and at the sametime enables and restricts further production. The approach is exemplified by the religious dynamics in contemporary China focusing on the worship of Fuxi in popularand state rituals. The example also serves to illustrate divergent views of what counts as religion.

Seiwert, Hubert. “The Dynamics of Religions and Cultural Evolution: Worshipping Fuxi in Contemporary China.” In Dynamics of Religion: Past and Present. Edited by Christoph Bochinger, and Jörg Rüpke, 9–30. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.

Politics and religion are both concepts whose meaning is disputed. The history of both terms goes back to classical antiquity, with 'politics' deriving from Greek politics, which refers to what concerns the public affairs of the polis, the community of free citizens. Both concepts evolved in early modern Europe to become key concepts for classifying different aspects of social reality. However, just as in the case of 'religion; the meaning of politics varies depending on philosophical and sociological theories as well as practical concerns (Sellin 2004 [1975]). Hence, both are fuzzy concepts without clear demarcations and definitions but with a reasonable degree of applicability in academic and everyday discourses.

Seiwert, Hubert. “Politics.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion. Edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 430–49. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

In this article, I explore how nations without states, or ‘stateless nations’ respond to new forms of religious diversity. Drawing on the cases of Quebec and Catalonia, I do so by tracing the historical emergence of the cultural narratives that are mobilized to support institutional responses to diversity and the way they bear on contemporary controversies. The article builds on recent research and theorizations of religious diversity and secularism, which it expands and specifies by spelling out how pre‐existing cultural anxieties stemming from fears over national survival are stored in collective memories and, if successfully mobilized, feed into responses to migration‐driven religious diversification. I show that while Quebec and Catalonia were in many ways similarly positioned before the onset of powerful modernization processes and the resurgence of nationalism from the 1960s onwards, their responses to religious diversity differ dramatically.

Burchardt, Marian. “Recalling Modernity: How Nationalist Memories Shape Religious Diversity in Quebec and Catalonia.” Nations and Nationalism 41, no. 4 (2016): 1–21. 

Between 2006 and 2014, Quebec – Charles Taylor’s home – has witnessed some of the fiercest political debates about secularism and public religion in recent history. In this chapter, I explore how A Secular Age is related to the normative claims made in these debates and to Taylor’s own political interventions in them. Similar to other Western societies, contestations about secularism in Quebec are characterized by the fact that they drew on divergent understandings of ‘the secular.’ In other words, participants in these discourses crafted divergent versions of secularism as a “problem-space”. As I will show, centered on the notion of emancipation from religion on the one hand and respect for religious diversity on the other, these discourses feed on collective memories that were mobilized to buttress the claims made in their name.

Burchardt, Marian. “Does Religion Need Rehabilitation? Charles Taylor and the Critique of Secularism.” In Working with a Secular Age: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Charles Taylor's Master Narrative. Edited by Florian Zemmin, Colin Jager, and Guido Vanheeswijck, 137–58. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016.

In this essay, Lamba reflects upon Gandhi’s approach to inter-religious conflict in India in an effort to draw out his distinctive response to some of the challenges posed by religious pluralism. His perspectives on these challenges not only offer interesting moral and political insights into the Indian political and social context, but may enrich the analyses of those interested in religious diversity in Europe, North America, and China.

Lamba, Rinku. “Gandh's Response to Religious Conflict.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 45, no. 4 (2016): 470–75.

In this article, Burchardt explores how nations without states, or ‘stateless nations’ respond to new forms of religious diversity. Drawing on the cases of Quebec and Catalonia, He does so by tracing the historical emergence of the cultural narratives that are mobilized to support institutional responses to diversity and the way they bear on contemporary controversies. The article builds on recent research and theorizations of religious diversity and secularism, which it expands and specifies by spelling out how pre‐existing cultural anxieties stemming from fears over national survival are stored in collective memories and, if successfully mobilized, feed into responses to migration‐driven religious diversification. Burchardt shows that while Quebec and Catalonia were in many ways similarly positioned before the onset of powerful modernization processes and the resurgence of nationalism from the 1960s onwards, their responses to religious diversity differ dramatically.

Burchardt, Marian. “Recalling Modernity: How Nationalist Memories Shape Religious Diversity in Quebec and Catalonia.” Nations and Nationalism 41, no. 4 (2016): 1–21.

This article draws on the notion of ‘cultural defense’ to examine how nationalism shapes contemporary contestations around religion and secularity in Armenia. While clearly relevant, this framework has rarely been used for the analysis of religious change in the Caucasus region as part of the broader post-Soviet space. This article fills this lacuna. Simultaneously, it moves beyond the relatively narrow interest in the degree of secularization or reinforced religious nationalism as social outcomes of cultural defense situations. Instead, we are interested in how boundaries between religion and secular spheres in society are drawn in particular ways, how the resulting religious – secular configurations have evolved since the end of the Soviet Union – of which Armenia was a part – and how concepts of nationhood and nationalist mobilizations have shaped this process.

Burchardt, Marian; Hovhannisyan, Hovhannes (2016): Religious vs secular nationhood. 'Multiple secularities' in post-Soviet Armenia. In: Social Compass 63(4), S. 427–443.

This article discusses the usefulness of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory for the study of religion. Postcolonial deconstructivism, sometimes labelled ‘critical religion’, in the style of R. McCutcheon, T. Fitzgerald, and others doubts the applicability of this highly complex and abstract theory as such. Their proponents argue that the idea of an ‘autopoietic’ social system called ‘religion’ is a genuinely modern Western concept by which ‘religion’, as a generic term, is inappropriately projected or imposed onto non-Western and premodern cultures. Furthermore, they claim that Luhmann proposes a sui generis concept of religion. While due to a lack of shared theoretical premises, it seems to be all but impossible to reconcile a systems-theoretical approach to the study of religion with this strand of a radical postcolonial deconstructivism, other critiques of Luhmann’s concept of religion deserve a closer look.

As is well known, Luhmann defines religion as one social sub-system among others (such as politics, economy, sport, law, family, art). Social systems, he claims, are constituted, upheld, and reproduced by communication which demarcates the borders of the respective system and thus generates a system environment. Communication is possible only between the elements within a given system but not between the elements of different systems. Accordingly, Luhmann defines social systems as self-generating, or ‘autopoietic’. Social systems are operationally closed but cognitively open as they perceive irritations from their environment and react to them. Each social system, according to Luhmann, has its own binary code along which all communication within the system is structured. In the case of religion this code is transcendence/immanence. Furthermore, in modern society, Luhmann claims, social systems are primarily differentiated in accordance with their specific functions for society as a whole. The function of religion is to transfer indeterminability (transcendence) into determinability (immanence).
Some sociologists, such as Rudi Laermans and Gert Verschraegen (2001), as well as scholars of religion, such as Peter Beyer (2001, 2006) have criticized Luhmann for defining transcendence/immanence as the religious code. Laermans and Verschraegen accuse Luhmann’s view of religion of being “all too obviously based on the theological self-observations – or the self-descriptions – of (Christian!) religion”. From a somewhat different perspective, Peter Beyer also blames Luhmann’s approach for being deductive and “theological”. He proposes to replace the code transcendence/immanence with the code blessed/damned or salvation/damnation.
In my view both Laermans/Verschraegen and Beyer miss the point because they misinterpret Luhmann’s concept of ‘transcendence’. Not only is Beyer’s code ‘blessed/damned’ much more ‘theologically’ charged than the code ‘transcendence/immanence’. Luhmann repeatedly notes that he uses ‘transcendence’ in a non-theological way, entirely disconnected from religious semantics. ‘Transcendence’ in his theory is simply the horizon of an appresented indeterminability that emerges as soon as communication takes place. Because every communication in every social system by necessity selects between what is chosen (presented) and what is rejected or ignored (but still appresented), it produces an indeterminable remainder, causing uncertainty and irritation. The special social function of the religious system is to deal with this fundamental communicative operation of differentiating between the presented and the appresented. Therefore, to dismiss or replace the binary code transcendence/ immanence means to deprive the religious system of its social function. In my view Luhmann’s functional theory of religion can only work as long as the fundamental premise of transcendence/immanence being the religious code is maintained.
Even though Luhmann’s critics – in my view – clearly misinterpret his theory, it cannot be denied that the application of systems theory in the study of religion poses some serious problems. These problems largely result from the high degree of abstraction of Luhmann’s theory which makes it difficult to relate it to real people. On the other hand, viewed from the perspective of historical discourse analysis, which is based on the assumption that there is no way to go behind the discourse anyway, systems theory may provide valuable heuristic tools and concepts for analyzing emic negotiations regarding the boundary between ‘religion’ and ‘the secular,’ irrespective of the actual usage of the term ‘religion’ in the emic discourses. This is what distinguishes a historical discourse analysis informed by Luhmann’s systems theory from recently proposed approaches of a ‘discursive study of religion’.

Kleine, Christoph (2016). “Niklas Luhmann und die Religionswissenschaft: Geht das zusammen?” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 24/1: 47–82. doi:10.1515/zfr-2016-0005 .

The paper argues that the distinction between religious and secular realms of society is not as clear-cut in modern societies as it appears in theories of functional and institutional differentiation. The data used are mainly from China with a short excursion to the United States. The starting point is ancestor worship, which is a central element of traditional Chinese religion. The significance of ancestor worship in Chinese history and culture is briefly explained to illustrate on the one hand its central importance as a ritual practice and on the other hand the ambiguities of interpretation. On this basis, some theoretical considerations about the existence of ancestors are presented. This is followed by a report on contemporary temple festivals focusing on the worship of Fuxi, a mythic figure considered to be the first ancestor of the Chinese people. The next step is the description of official state rituals devoted to the worship of the very same mythological hero in contemporary China. Against this backdrop, the last part of the paper discusses the theoretical questions of classification and distinguishing between the religious and the secular.

Seiwert, Hubert (2016). “Ancestor Worship and State Rituals in Contemporary China: Fading Boundaries between Religious and Secular.” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 24/2: 127–52. doi:10.1515/zfr-2016-0013.