Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
IN SECULAR SOCIETY
FROM A TAKEN-FOR-GRANTED INSTITUTION TO A CONTESTED RESOURCE
James A. Beckford
Introduction
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JAMES A. BECKFORD
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4 Wilson has consistently argued that cults and sects might continue to thrive
amidst general secularisation (Wilson 1976). Others, among whom M ax W eber was
the most notable, have identified the popularity of exotic religious innovations as
evidence of secularisation in the sense of declining faith in the old gods and the
invention of ersatz deities to replace them.
JAMES A. BECKFORD
Religion has come adrift from its former points of anchorage but is
no less potentially powerful as a result. It remains a potent cultural
resource or form which may act as the vehicle of change, challenge
or conservation. Consequently, religion has become less predictable . . .
And the chances that religion will be controversial are increased by
the fact that it may be used by people having little or no connection
with formal religious organisations. The deregulation of religion is one
of the hidden ironies of secularisation.5
This situation may represent what Meerten ter Borg calls dein
stitutionalisation of religion,6 but unlike him I detect signs of re
institutionalisation or at least of struggles to impose new boundaries
around religion. To some extent the growth of religious diversity
in the U.K. has helped to precipitate some of these struggles.
In fact, one of the main reasons for the contentiousness of reli
gion in the U.K. is that migration of Buddhists, Hindus, Jains,
Muslims and Sikhs from the Caribbean, Hong Kong, South Asia
and East Africa since the early 1950s has sharply increased the degree
of religious diversity in the country.7 Many British-born members of
these faith communities are now children and young adults who are
living in large and well established settiements, mainly in large cities,
which are supported by numerous organisations for religious, cul
tural, political and social purposes. They are not so much commu
nities of migrants as integral, but distinctive, parts of British society.
Yet, their presence in the U.K. helps to ensure that the boundary
between religion and non-religion remains contentious.
For example, English common law makes it an offence (termed
blasphemy) to ridicule, vilify or insult the tenets of the Church of
England.8 Since this law does not apply to any other churches or
religions, those Muslims who were aggrieved by the publication in
1988 of Salman Rushdies novel, The Satanic Verses, were unable to
bring a prosecution for blasphemy. A campaign to extend the law
on blasphemy to all religions was launched, with support from the
leading representatives of various faith communities, including many
Christians, but the British Government decided in 1989 that it had
no intention of extending the legislation to cover Islam or any other
26
27
9 Law Commission Working Paper 1981, no. 79: Offences against religion and
public worship.
10 Jones 1990.
JAMES A. BECKFORD
The need for reform is clear. At present the law is unjust because it
distinguishes between different religious adherents in a manner which
is arbitrary and incapable of rational defence. To clarify the law in a
manner which would promote religious freedom would be a difficult
task involving . . . the need to address the question of the definition of
religion . . . [T]he present law of charity provides yet another illus
tration of the mixture of bias and muddle which characterises British
laws attitude towards religions.12
My point is that the origins of the bias and muddle can be traced
back to the late medieval and early modern tendency to equate reli
gion with a particular form of Christianity and that the rapid growth
of non-Christian faith communities and philosophies of life in the
U.K. in the second half of the twentieth-century has exacerbated the
original confusion. It is notoriously difficult to assess the size of, for
example, the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities, but
they probably constitute about 3 millions of the 58 millions popu
lation of the U.K.
As in the case of the law of blasphemy, the level of dissatisfac
tion with the law of charity is reaching a point where many people
are calling for the removal of the advancement of religion from the
list of criteria of charitable status in law. The dissatisfaction is appar
ent in the following plea from a prominent columnist in one of the
U.K.s good quality newspapers:
Religion is ineffable, mysterious, an act of faith, a state of grace, a
light inaccessibly hidden from our eyesnot, in other words, the sort
of thing courts or charity commissioners should be expected to codify
and police. There is only one sane answerand that is to deregister
them all. Our secular society, where only 35 per cent of people believe
in a Supreme Being, should not be spending public funds, in tax for
gone, to finance any of these curious beliefs.13
The tone of Toynbees article also reflects a feeling of exasperation
with arrangements which tie religion and law closely together. This,
in turn, is probably part of a wider frustration with what I shall call
the juridification of everything. It suggests that religion does not
deserve the protection of the law if it needs to be juridified again,
harking back to an earlier era in which it was unnecessary to define
religion because it was coterminous with Anglican Christianity.
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29
JAMES A. BECKFORD
30
17 Jackson 1992.
18 Bum & H art 1988.
19 In particular, DfE Circular 3/89 and DfES Circular 1/89.
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JAMES A. BECKFORD
20 Hull 1991.
21 Esther Oxford concluded an article in The Independent (30 January 1994) on
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new model syllabuses for RE with the Government hails religion as a barrier against
moral corruption and intolerable anarchy. Evidence for this opinion may have been
drawn from the assertion of Lord Tebbitt, a prominent member of Mrs Thatchers
governments, that the members of a society must have in common Taws, customs,
standards, values, language, culture and religion if instability in society were to be
avoided. Lord Tebbitt made this claim in the course of delivering the first Nicholas
Ridley Memorial Lecture on 22 November 1993.
22 Cox & Marks 1984: 88.
23 Cox & Marks 1984: 88.
24 DfE Circular 1/94 Religious Education and Collective W orship.
25 His interpretation may seem far-fetched but it is at least consonant with the
Minister for Educations personal preferences, as expressed in The Spectator on 2nd
October 1993: Id like more people to study science. Id like more of them to show
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JAMES A. BECKFORD
35
ate form of religious broadcasts, the 1990 Act and the regulatory
body that it created took a very cautious approach to the topic of
religious advertising.
It is the statutory duty of the Independent Television Commission
(ITC) to draw up and enforce a code governing the standards of
advertisements on the countrys two terrestrial commercial television
channels and on all existing satellite and future channels. The codes
general principles require that all television advertisements should be
legal, decent, honest and truthful, but special rules apply to reli
gious advertisements (as well as to advertisements designed to appeal
to children, financial advertisements, advertisements relating to health
and medicine, and charity advertising). The rules do not define reli
gion as such but they apply to advertising which is submitted by
or on behalf of any body with objects wholly or mainly of a reli
gious nature or which is directed towards any religious end as well
as to systems of belief or philosophy of life which do not involve
recognition of a deity but which can reasonably be regarded as equiv
alent or alternative to those which do.27 This is a highly inclusive
approach which implies greater concern with the effects of deistic and
non-deistic belief systems than with the beliefs themselves. In fact,
one of the rules explicitly forbids advertisers from expounding reli
gious doctrine and belief or from appearing to involve viewers in
acts of worship or prayer. Advertisers are also forbidden to appeal
for funds for themselves, claim to represent the only true faith, play
on fears, promote faith healing, offer counselling, direct advertise
ments specifically at viewers under eighteen years of age, offer gifts
other than publications, and seek to exploit vulnerable categories of
viewers such as the elderly or the bereaved. In fact, the only per
missible purposes of religious advertising are:
(i) to publicise events
(ii) to describe an organisations activities and ways of contact
ing it
(iii) to offer publications or videos about the organisation.
There is no doubt that this highly restrictive code is designed to pro
tect viewers from exploitative or manipulative religious organisations.
How does the advertising code identify exploitative and manipu
lative organisations? The Guidance Notes which accompany the code
specify that advertisements are not acceptable from bodies whose
27 Independent Television Commission, 1995: 30.
JAMES A. BECKFORD
this writing, the dispute seems to have been setded in the Scientologists
favour, it is extremely unlikely that this particular case and its under
lying issues will not return to the headlines in the future.
Turning to the wider implications of the case concerning the
Church of Scientology, it seems to me that the IT C s advertising
code makes it difficult for religious orders, brotherhoods, cults, sects,
mosques, temples, mandirs, synagogues and gurdwaras which nor
mally admit to their religious services only those people who are
qualified to participate in them to advertise on television. To put
this more provocatively, the more demanding a religious organisa
tions criteria of admission are, the less likely it is that such an
organisation will be permitted to advertise itself. The long-term effect
of the IT C s policy might be to encourage the standardisation of
religious organisations in a relatively bland, non-challenging and noncontroversial form. High demand and exclusive religious organi
sations would be, by the same token, driven out of the religious
market because they would not have access to televisionthe most
powerful medium of publicity. O f course, this is speculation on my
part, but it is based on indisputable evidence about the long-standing
policy in the U.K. of preventing controversial religious organisations
from featuring in religious programmes, although news items and
investigative documentary programmes often subject controversial
religious organisations to examination and criticism. This categori
cal discrimination against religious organisations which depart from
mainstream Christian norms might eventually become another cause
of religious controversy.
In short, the IT C s policy on religious advertising is a clear recog
nition of the fact that religion is already considered sufficiently con
troversial to require the imposition of exceptionally restrictive rules
on religious advertising on television. Moreover, these rules help to
institutionalise and to reinforce the categorical distinction between
normal or acceptable religious organisations and others whose ad
vertisements would be excluded from television. In time, it is pos
sible that other excluded religious organisations will follow the
Church of Scientologys example of challenging the ITC s ruling that
it was not an acceptable organisation to advertise itself on television.
This would signal a new phase in the paradoxical process whereby
religion becomes more controversial as its host societies become more
secularised.
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37
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JAMES A. BECKFORD
Conclusion
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References
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Beckford, J.A., 1989, Religion and Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge.
Bellah, R.N., 1970, Beyond Belief. New York: Harper & Row.
Borg, M. ter, W hat is religion?, in this volume.
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Davie, G., 1990, Believing without Belonging: Is this the Future of Religion in
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, 1994, Religion in Britain since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Geertz, C., 1966, Religion as a Cultural System, in Banton 1966: 1-46.
Hanegraaff, W., Defining Religion in Spite of History, in this volume.
Hervieu-Leger, D., 1986, Vers un nouveau Christianisme? Paris: Cerf.
30 Adriaanse in this volume.
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JAMES A. BECKFORD