Religion and the Public Sphere: Revisiting the Boundaries of Theory and Practice in a Postsecular Age

Dear Colleagues,

Our edition explores the rapidly evolving role of religion, spirituality and belief in society from several different critical, theoretical, disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Particular attention gets paid to contemporary debates on religion and intersectionality (Singh 2015) and decoloniality (Yountae 2024) including their framings in historical, spatial, sociological, theological and religious studies disciplines.

A central question therefore posed by this special edition concerns the enduring intellectual purchase, or otherwise, of the notion of postsecularity (Mendieta 2018, Beaumont 2018, Ratti, 2012, Cloke, Baker et al., 2019) for grasping religion in the public sphere.

In the absence of a confident and coherent secular narrative for human and global futures, an emerging consensus indicates that religion, spirituality and belief find themselves re-entering the public spheres of late modernity at different scales, revalorized as much sought after sources of reflexive meaning-making and political solidarity. While characteristic of systems in the West, a question mark hangs over the efficacy of this revalorization outside the colonial, Christian Western nexus.

Our case studies and narratives suggest that religious-inspired actors and institutions are often increasingly confident curators in many areas of emancipatory social change. This progressivism endures despite attempts by other religious and non-religious actors to dismiss, bypass or control these changes through regressive, authoritarian populisms in public spheres around the world.

The implications and geographical articulation of this new visibility of religion in the public sphere are unclear. What’s certain is the need to construct a new theory of social change and political philosophy that critically interrogates and better understands the evolving boundaries between the religious and the secular in more dynamic, reflexive and interconnected ways.

Our special edition seeks clarity on these shifts from the perspective of the following vectors of inquiry.

(1) The unprecedented series of political, economic and social traumas – associated with COVID-19, the rise in violent warfare, growing poverty and inequality, climate change – reconfigure perspectives on religion and belief in public life.

(2) Simple readings of headline statistics of religious growth or decline fail to capture the nuanced and complex ways boundaries between the religious and secular are redrawn at a micro-public and locality level with implications for those margins at other scales.

(3) As the world becomes more urban and global levels of religious affiliation broadly defined remain high, spatial and material relations between the religious and the urban become increasingly central.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

References:

Beaumont, J. (ed.) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity, first hardback edition, 2020 paperback, London/ New York: Routledge.

Cloke, P., Baker, C., Sutherland, C. and A. Williams (2019) Geographies of Postsecularity: Re-envisioning Politics, Subjectivity and Ethics, London: Routledge.

Mendieta. E. (2018) ‘The axial age, social evolution, and postsecular consciousness’, Critical Research on Religion, 6(3): 289-308.

Ratti, M. (2012). The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203071793.

Singh J. (2015) Religious Agency and the Limits of Intersectionality. Hypatia;30(4):657-674. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12182.

Yountae A. (2024) The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Prof. Dr. Christopher Baker
Dr. Justin Beaumont
Guest Editors

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• religion
• spirituality
• belief
• postsecular
• urbanisation
• decolonial
• intersectionality
• activism
• solidarity
• politics