Author Archives: Liudmila Nikanorova

Cloisters, Durham Cathedral

‘Nones’ in the Cathedral

By Marion Bowman

In the 2021 census, ‘No religion’ was the second most common response (37.2% or 22.2 million people), while ‘for the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”’.

These statistics relating to people who self-identify as being of No Religion—also known as Nones—have been receiving media attention, and Hannah Waite has produced a fascinating report The Nones: Who are they and what do they believe? (Theos, 2022). Waite concludes that there are broadly ‘three distinctive types or clusters of Nones’:

“Campaigning Nones” are self-consciously atheistic and hostile to religion; “Tolerant Nones” are broadly atheistic but accepting of (sometimes warm towards) religion; and “Spiritual Nones”, who are characterised by a range of spiritual beliefs and practices, as much as many people who tick the “Religion” box (Waite 2022, 6).

In the course of the ‘Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals Past and Present’ research project, we discovered that people who self-identify as being of No Religion, the Nones, appear to be regularly visiting cathedrals in England today. What are they doing there? And what does this tell us about the internal diversity of this growing demographic?

 The 3-year interdisciplinary AHRC-funded project, ‘Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, past and present’ (pilgrimageandcathedrals.ac.uk) involved partnership with Canterbury Cathedral, Durham Cathedral and York Minster (all now Anglican, Church of England), and Westminster Cathedral (Roman Catholic). The genesis of the project was the fact that both pilgrimage and engaging with cathedrals now appear to be more popular in England than at any point since the Reformation. This popular mapping of meaning onto special places and interest in pilgrimage gives rise to questions such as: ‘Why is this happening now?’, ‘What is going on?’ and, significantly for our purposes here, ‘Who is involved?’.

For the contemporary data collection, we employed both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Altogether, we conducted 110 face-to-face interviews and 25 email interviews, and received 500 completed paper questionnaires and 58 online questionnaire responses. We also employed participant observation, and ‘hanging out’ which included sitting in different parts of a cathedral at different times of day and simply people-watching. This allowed different forms of data to be linked together. For example, an activity that shows up in statistics like candle lighting could be followed up by talking to the volunteer who cleans the candle stand, the visitor who lights the candle, but also by simply observing a candle stand over time, without intervening, just to see how often candles are lit, what might be done in relation to candle lighting, where the most popular spaces to light a candle might be, and so on. I’m going to concentrate here on findings from our three Anglican cathedrals— Canterbury Cathedral (one of England’s preeminent medieval pilgrimage destinations), York Minster (one of the largest medieval Gothic cathedrals in Northern Europe) and Durham Cathedral.

Site of Shrine of Thomas Becket, Canterbury Cathedral (Photograph Marion Bowman)

 York Minster (Photograph Marion Bowman)

St Cuthbert’s Shrine, Durham Cathedral (Photograph Marion Bowman)

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The Secularization of Money

By Paul-François Tremlett

Money is so ubiquitous, so ordinary and everyday that it can sometimes evade critical scrutiny. We are familiar with using money as a means of exchange; we are paid money for our labour, and we pay or owe money for the goods and services that we use or purchase. Money is a magic that renders very different things equivalent by assigning them values. These days we are inundated with news about the cost of living and the economy, but I am not talking about money in this sense, or indeed as a kind of magic. The money I’m interested in is the physical stuff in our pockets, purses and wallets and, in particular, the national and cultural symbols that it carries.

If you have some coins and notes to hand, this would be a good moment to examine them: in my wallet I have one ten-pound note and one twenty-pound note. On the ten-pound note there is the Queen (I’ve yet to see one of the new notes displaying the King’s head) and various images associated with Jane Austen including a quote from Pride and Prejudice and images of Godmersham Park which Austen visited a number of times, as well as Winchester Cathedral, where she was buried. On the twenty-pound note there is the Queen (again), and the painter J. M. W. Turner and an image of his painting, The Fighting Temeraire. I also have some coins of various values which are notable for carrying various national and cultural symbols including the Queen’s head, the Royal Coat of Arms and the phrase “Dieu et Mon Droit” which refers to the divine right of the monarch and the national symbols of England (rose), Scotland (thistle), Wales (leek) and Northern Ireland (shamrock). The point I am making is that when we use physical money, we are not only exchanging these tokens (coins and notes) for goods and services. We are also exchanging culturally loaded national symbols which, among other things, authorise the works of certain individuals as exemplary national culture and legitimate certain institutions as sacred.

But what has any of this got to do with secularization? The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2000) defines secularization as that process whereby “people, losing confidence in other-worldly or supernatural accounts of the cosmos and its destiny, abandon religious beliefs and practices” such that “religion loses its influence on society”. But we can also understand secularization as a wider process that is not only about religion but about the wider desacralization – or what the sociologist Max Weber called “disenchantment” – of once hallowed beliefs, practices and institutions.

One of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the rapid decline in the exchange of the physical tokens called money and their replacement by contactless and online methods of exchange. According to Bella Thorpe-Woods, before Covid, the exchange of cash had been dropping by around 15% a year since 2017 (source). In 2020, partly as a result of (erroneous) fears that Covid could be caught by handling notes and coins, that fell by a further 35%. Current projections suggest that Britain will be a cashless society by 2026.

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Protests in Iran: Football and Headscarves

By Hugh Beattie

The Iranian football team recently attracted some attention in Qatar, not just because of the games they played in, but also because the players did not sing the Iranian national anthem before the game with England. Their brief protest reminds us that after three months of demonstrations it seems that the government has still not got a grip on the widespread protests that began in September following the death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, on September 16, in hospital in Teheran following her arrest by the Guidance Patrol, known as the Morality Police.  

There have of course been serious demonstrations against the government before – in 2009 and 2019 for example, but these were relatively easily crushed. 

Rejection of the headscarf has become an important feature of the current protests. Women’s dress has been a controversial issue in Iran for many years, becoming a central symbol during the culture wars between more secular and more religious sections of Iranian public opinion. In 1936, as part of efforts to modernise the country, the government of Shah Reza Pahlavi brought in the Mandatory Unveiling Act which made it illegal for women to wear a veil. For some years the law was harshly enforced; one reason for what the historian Nikki Keddie calls ‘a later pro-veil backlash’ (Keddie 1981). When serious protests broke out against the government of Shah Muhammad Pahlavi (Shah Reza Pahlavi’s son) in 1978, wearing a cloak (chador) which covers the whole body became a symbol of women’s resistance to the Shah and his Westernising government. After the overthrow of the Shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, women were required to dress modestly. When they left the home they had to wear a manteau, a kind of overcoat, and a headscarf to cover their hair. Wearing a chador was not actually compulsory, but even the manteau and the headscarf have become increasingly unpopular during the past few years. In passing it is interesting to note the contrast with Turkey, where during the 1980s the headscarf was actually banned in public institutions, universities among them, and women have continued to argue that this is unfair and that those who want to wear it should be allowed to do so (like in this example). 

To return to Iran, the Tony Blair Institute recently published an opinion poll from Iran with some interesting findings – 

  • of the women interviewed 74 per cent opposed the compulsory wearing of the hijab (a headscarf that covers the head and neck; hijab can also refer to clothing that covers the whole body apart from hands and face) as did 71 per cent of men. 
  • 84 per cent of those respondents wanted ‘regime change’. 

Perhaps the most surprising result was that 76 per cent considered that religion did not play an important part in their lives (source). 

In response to the ongoing demonstrations in various parts of the country, government forces have so far killed more than 400 people and detained around 16,000 others. But two weeks ago, the Iranian Attorney General seemed to make a concession to the protestors when he announced that the Guidance Patrol, which enforces the laws on dress and personal behaviour, would be suspended. Roya Hakakian, however, suggests that the current protests are about more than the headscarf, and that the government’s recent suspension of the Guidance Police will not be sufficient to satisfy the protestors (see the recent piece in The Atlantic).  Certainly, the Iranian singer-songwriter Shirvin Hajipour refers to a wide range of grievances in his song Baraye (with English translation), which has been referred to as the anthem of 2022 protests. 

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