New Publication | Brill Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion

Lecturer in Religious Studies, David G. Robertson, is one of the editors of the just-published Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion, along with Asbjørn Dyrendal (NTNU, Norway) and Egil Asprem (Stockholm University).

Conspiracy theories are a ubiquitous feature of our times. The Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion is the first reference work to offer a comprehensive, transnational overview of this phenomenon along with in-depth discussions of how conspiracy theories relate to religion(s). Bringing together experts from a wide range of disciplines, from psychology and philosophy to political science and the history of religions, the book sets the standard for the interdisciplinary study of religion and conspiracy theories.

As well as David’s contributions, the book also includes a chapter co-written by Lecturer Suzanne Newcombe, entitled “Trust Me, You Can’t Trust Them”: Stigmatised Knowledge in Cults and Conspiracies.” Other chapters include methodological overviews from sociology, psychology and philosophy; regional case studies on Sri Lanka, Albania, Greece, Japan and elsewhere; thematic chapters on popular music, Esotericism, Church of the SubGenius, neo-Nazism, the Internet; and more.

Remembrance Sunday | British Churches and National Commemoration of the War Dead since 1914

In case you missed it the first time, here’s Philip Williamson (Durham University) talking about Remembrance Day: the British Churches and National Commemoration of the War Dead since 1914, one of the keynote presentations from our Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective conference, recorded Feb 21st 2018.

Most historical work on commemoration emphasises the civil creations from 1919 onwards: Armistice day, the two-minutes silence, the Cenotaph, the War Graves Commission and war memorials, and the British Legion.  Aside from the burial of the Unknown Warrior, the churches are treated almost as adjuncts. Yet British church leaders had been involved with remembrance since 1914, and from 1919 they created their own religious commemoration of Remembrance day, which in 1946 replaced Armistice day as the official occasion for national commemoration.  Against the supposed trends towards secularisation, the churches acquired and retain a leading part in remembrance of the war dead. Yet some tension always existed between the civil and religious commemorations, and what secured the place of the churches in national rituals also brought compromises. This paper will consider how the protestant churches created a new religious commemoration of the war dead; how remembrance contributed to co-operation between leaders of the various British churches; how the character of Remembrance has changed; and how in national commemoration the churches and the state arrived at an alliance of church religion and civil religion.

Photo by James Harris on Unsplash

Little Makeshift Shrines to Dead People

By David G. Robertson

Were there always little makeshift shrines to dead people around the city?

I ask in all seriousness. I grew up in Inverness but ended up in Leith about fifteen years ago, and since then I have been fascinated by the makeshift memorials that I began to see popping up every few months. Like roadside shrines.

Usually they are for young who have died in unfortunate circumstances: a young man who was attacked late at night around New Year; where a child was hit by a car; where a heroin addict died after a fight outside Boots as they waited for their methadone prescription. There’s an unusual one on a cycle path rather than a pavement, but I’m not sure about the details there. It is interesting to note the similarities among the features, however: football colours are typical, as well as other hobbies, like music; flowers are always present, and candles. So while there is (usually) no explicitly religious content, there are recognizable funerary symbols.

Leith’s an interesting part of Edinburgh. For a long time it was very rundown, and when I moved to Edinburgh in the 1990s (around the time Trainspotting was released) it was still known as “The Heroin Capital of Europe”; now it has three different Michelin Starred restaurants and one of Britain’s top tourist attractions. So unlike, say, Morningside or Stockbridge, it’s not very middle-class – more a few rich people and then a BIG gap before you get down to folk like me. But Leith also has a Catholic heritage, even if most people don’t realise why Hibs fans are referred to as “Huns”. So maybe these kinds of spontaneous shrines were always something that happened in Leith, and I didn’t see them before because I was in Calvinist Inverness. I wonder, then, if they are common in Glasgow? [Update: Marion Bowman just shared a photo of one for a Big Issue seller in Bath).

Or maybe they’re a recent phenomenon. Our Instagram feed has included several photos of padlocks appearing on fences in popular tourist spots, and in the last few years the practice of rubbing the toe of the statue of John Knox on the Royal Mile has gone from something specific to philosophy graduates to all tourists, and has now spread to Greyfriar’s Bobby’s nose, 100 yards along George IV Bridge. These rituals are certainly changing over a relatively short period of time, although a serious dive into the broader sociological reasons why would require more space than a blog post would allow. But it is certainly interesting to speculate on these shrines being members of the public reclaiming what had traditionally been a function of religious institutions in a post-Christian Scotland.

Instead, I want to end on a point about how we read data for change. To assume that such change was a new phenomenon would be an error, if I didn’t have data from the period before. Just as it would be wrong to assume that sexual fetishes only began with the Kinsey Report, to assume that popular religious practices only started when scholars started to record them may be making the tail wag the dog. As I argued in a previous post, to assume that social behaviours are static and unchanging until the scholar casts their gaze upon it is rather colonial in itself, as though everything “primitive” (be that the colonies or the proles) never changed until it was forced on them. We see this much change and innovation in a few square miles over ten years – what would a history of any of the supposedly monolithic “World Religions” look like with this level of detail? How well would any of the claims to continuity, consistency and tradition hold up?

The  Black Majority Churches and ecumenism

 

On 30 October as part of Black History Month the department is contributing to ‘The Black Majority Churches and Ecumenism’ [pdf flier here] – a public event at the New Testament Church of God Learning and Training Centre in Northampton. The event is hosted and chaired by the Revd. Phyllis Thompson of the NTCG. In the Q and A with Dr John Maiden below, Revd. Thompson discusses the history of relations between the historic mainline churches and the BMCs in Britain, and says more about this event.

How would you describe the interactions between local black majority churches and mainline congregations in Britain in the 1970s and before?

The interactions were tentative and fraught in the main due to ignorance, scepticism, disappointment, frustration, racism and rejection to mention a few of the reported experiences.  Some of the men and women who came to the UK during this time, came as migrants and missionaries. Oliver Lyseight, for example, founding admin Bishop of the New Testament Church of God and listed 3rd of 100 Black British Achievers, belongs to a denomination which is part of a global Pentecostal movement currently with over 8 million members in over 34,000 local congregations in more than 184 countries around the world (www.churchofgod.org). Determined to sustain his faith in the midst of the dissatisfaction and discontent, Oliver Lyseight – like many others – established branch congregations of their Pentecostal denominations in the UK. Given the sociopolitical issues mentioned earlier, the so called ‘black majority churches’ emerged and with this history the critical need for meaningful and sincere dialogue to address the fears, prejudice, and injustice of racial discrimination and identify ways in which the ‘historic churches and the so called ‘black majority churches’ could dialogue and find a voice to bring healing amongst its constituency, and together present the Christian message to the wider community.

You were involved in a project called Zebra in North East London from the late 1970s. What was Zebra and what was its approach to developing local relationships between BMCs and mainlines?

The Zebra project, as Deryck Collingwood, Chairman of the London N. E. District of the Methodist Church, said at the time, ‘was born out of disappointment.’ Ira Brooks, a leading New Testament Church of God Minister speaking on behalf of the Zebra Project, said ‘I have watched the painful success of Zebra from inside – having worked as a member of its steering committee for some years… people from various walks of life and professions are becoming more and more aware of it as a resource of information and expertise, especially within the delicate and difficult matters of racial harmony that are available for the use of blending and strengthening Britain’s multi-faith/cultural society for the 21st century.’ Insightful dialogue with the aim to encourage and support people of different backgrounds to work together to bring about racial justice was central to the  Zebra Project.

The public event on 30 October will explore some of this ecumenical history, and you will be chairing a discussion. How is this history, and the issues it raises, relevant to the churches in Britain today?

Clearly there is much to celebrate about the relationship between the ‘black majority churches’ and the ‘historic churches’ – this is evidenced, for example, by the  make-up of the leadership and work of Churches Together in England.

However, there is still a great deal to be done. An understanding of and engagement with the historical context  of the UK Churches should be a must for all church leaders who are keen to build on the wisdom of hindsight.

What do you think has been the impact of black majority churches on Christianity in Britain since Windrush?

The black majority Churches have made and continue to make significant contribution to the British religious landscape and the Christian witness in particular. Karen Gibson and her Kingdom Choir’s performance at the Royal wedding on the world’s stage is a good example, as are the many other Pentecostal Christians of African/Caribbean background who are making tremendous contribution via the so called seven spheres of influence as itemised by Loren Cunningham: Family, religion/church, Education, Government, Media, Celebration (Arts, Entertainment and Sports) and Economics(Business, Science, and technology).

The event costs £5, including lunch and refreshments. To book, email education@ntcg.org.uk

3 Minute Theories | Imagined Communities, with Stefanie Sinclair

We’re back! In bang-on three minutes, Stefanie Sinclair tells us about Benedict Anderson’s theory of Imagined Communities, in which groups gather around ideas and identities even when separated geographically. Originally coined for nationalism studies, the concept has great significance for other fields, including Religious Studies.

What Imagined COmmunities are you part of? Let us know in the comments!

Public Talk | The Black Majority Churches and Ecumenicism

John Maiden will be speaking at a public event on October 30th in Northampton, to recognise Black History Month, hosted by the New Testament Church of God, supported by the Religious Studies department at the Open University and the Religious Archives Group.

The event will explore historical and contemporary perspectives on the Black Majority Churches in the UK and ecumenism, including a historical talk by John Maiden entitled ‘“Partnership not paternalism”: the Black Majority Churches and Ecumenism’. This will be followed by a time for reflection and discussion chaired by the Revd. Phyllis Thompson (New Testament Church of God). There will also be an opportunity to visit the NTCG Heritage Centre.

The event costs £5, including lunch and refreshments. To book, or for more details, please contact Mrs Edris Buchanan-Edwards at Education@ntcg.org.uk by 19 October.

Friedrich A. Hayek, Max Weber and the Anthropocene

By Paul-François Tremlett

In a 2007 essay titled ‘Prophecy and the Near Future’, Jane Guyer developed a series of observations about how evangelical Christians and neoliberals conceive of time. She concluded that for both, the near future has disappeared. Action for the future is postponed indefinitely, premised upon an overwhelming sense of individual fallibility in the face of an inscrutable even unknowable world. In this short post, I bring Hayek and Weber together again to think about time but with regard to climate change, capitalism, individualism and Protestantism.

Friedrich A. Hayek’s concerns are not merely those of an economist: he is a social theorist and a philosopher, seeking to establish “true” individualism as a theory of society (1949: 6). He contrasts a fallible individual against the state. For Hayek, it is better for individuals to pursue their albeit narrow, private interests – the things that they can know – than surrender those interests and that knowledge to the plans of some seemingly beneficent, all-knowing state. Order and freedom are secured, according to Hayek, when individuals are free to pursue their interests and not when some arrogant collective body decides what it cannot know namely, the best interests of all. The scope of individual action described by Hayek is ultimately circumscribed by the occult forces of the market that allegedly translates every small decision-action into a larger and more perfect social formation, towards which “humility” (1949: 32) is, for Hayek, the most appropriate attitude.

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism concerns the psychological effects of ‘salvation anxiety’ on action. The Protestant belief in predestination generates a sense of human fallibility and powerlessness as to what can be known about God’s will but also about the wider world, precipitating psychological stress and a narrowing of attention to proximate material interests as proxies for private, spiritual ones. Weber concludes with a pessimistic warning as to the sustainability of the Protestant-capitalist formation his book describes: it will last “until the last ton of fossilised fuel is burnt” (2002: 123) he suggests, starkly.

The trouble with climate change – putting aside its potential for our extinction – is that it precisely requires individuals to cease only being concerned with their own private interests and to recognize that, at least when it comes to climate, there really is something beyond the fallible human individual – something that might be called science or the scientific community – that, galvanised by national and international institutions, really does have the necessary knowledge to compel us to act not selfishly but sociologically. I wager that, if humans do survive the impending climate crisis, Protestantism, individualism and capitalism won’t survive with them.

Continue reading →

Religious Studies and studying? Restraint and Celebration

Religious festivals involve a range of social practices. From having an annual drink with acquaintances before Christmas, office parties, spending money on gifts and eating a weeks’ worth of food in a day, and ideally fitting in all that study, juggling demands can be difficult. In this session, we think about what these religious festivals might add, and how restraint during Lent or Ramadan, followed by festivities, are different to things like dry January.

But what does this have to do with studying? Taking ideas of restraint and celebration and applying those to study, Graham Harvey and Paul-Francois Tremlett give you some space to think about potential gains vs time, acknowledging success, and when discipline can be useful in your studies.

From Student Hub Live

Scottish Nationalism “similar to religion”, says Judge

By David G. Robertson

An interesting story appeared in the Herald last week that illuminates some interesting features of the contemporary conversation about religion.

Chris McEleny was an electrician at the Ministry of Defense site in Beith, Inverclyde, and the SNP group leader on Inverclyde Council. In 2016, he announced he would be running as a candidate to become deputy leader of the SNP. He was then suspended by the MoD, and had his security clearance revoked. National security officials came to his home and asked him about his mental health, social media activity and pro-independence stance. McEleny resigned and pursued a discrimination case against the MoD, arguing that he had been fired because of his belief in independence.

But to do so, he had to argue that independence was a “philosophical belief”, and therefore a “protected characteristic” under the 2010 Equality Act. Legal precedent said that to fall under this category, his belief had to be “genuinely held”, involve “moral and ethical conviction” and relate to “weighty and substantial aspects of human life and behaviour”.

The judge ruled in his favour – impressive given that McEleny defended himself against the UK Government. In summing up, the judge said “The claimant has persuaded me that his belief in Scottish independence has a sufficiently similar cogency to a religious belief… to qualify as a philosophical belief.”

This preliminary ruling will now go forward to a full hearing, so expect to hear more about it in future. For now, I want to point out a few interesting points about how “religion” and “belief” are mobilised here.

Religion is about “genuinely held” beliefs. This could be problematic. Given that half the Jews in Israel are atheist, Scottish law would have to deny them any religious protection under this logic. Many forms of Buddhism would deny that belief was involved at all. What about sincerely held beliefs about female circumcision or witchcraft? What would we make about the many who identify as a religion but do not follow all of the rules and tenets of that religion? And if I have been raised in a religion and taken on its norms, how “genuinely held” are those beliefs? How do we test the “genuineness” of a belief? If it is not judged ‘genuine’, am I therefore lying?

Religion is about morality, and the “weighty” questions of life. Is it? Wouldn’t that make environmentalism or animal rights or the Geneva Convention religious? What counts as “weighty”? Who decides?

Religions are “cogent”. While the representatives of various traditions have a vested interest in presenting religions as internally consistent and sharing fundamental ideas, this is not true and never has been. [Try our Exploring Religions module for lots of examples].

“Belief” is never defined. Seems pedantic, perhaps, but it matters a great deal – and the fact that we all assume we know what “belief” means should start alarm bells ringing. The idea that we have a series of belief ‘statements’ in our minds that we refer to when we act is clearly untrue; we act before thought, we hold contradictory beliefs, we hold multiple beliefs at the same time, we don’t do what we think, and so on. Is my love for my wife a belief? What about that the sun will rise in the morning, or that the switch will make a light go on?

No; what is going on here is an appeal to Protestant ideas about “faith”. Religious beliefs are understood as a special kind of belief that, because it comes from God, must be protected from criticism from merely “rational” beliefs.

Religions deserve protection, but political or other beliefs do not. Because it is comparable to a religion, this nationalism needs protected by the law. But why should religion be uniquely protected? Judging from the panel on Religion in the Law at our Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective conference in February [soon to be a special issue of Implicit Religion], the issue at present seems to be mostly concerned with protecting minority groups, particularly immigrants, but problems arise as the model used is based on European Protestant Christianity. The law moves slowly, but in my experience, the legal system is willing, even keen, to listen.

Most comment on this case will revolve around the question of whether nationalism is or is not a religion, but this is really missing the point. Cases like these reveal the fault lines in how the category religion is understood in public discourse. Legal proceedings are an underused resource for analysing the public discourse on religion, and an especially important one, as it has real effects on people. My interest in religion has always been based in a fascination with the relationship between ideas and communities of people, and the law is the point where these ideas become inscribed in societies. If we as scholars are serious about wanting to be heard by the broader public, this might be a good place to focus our attention.