{"id":423,"date":"2017-07-17T08:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=423"},"modified":"2017-07-17T08:08:33","modified_gmt":"2017-07-17T08:08:33","slug":"culture-wars-2-0-and-the-end-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=423","title":{"rendered":"Culture Wars 2.0 and the End of Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Paul-Francois Tremlett. Part 1 of a series<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The recent election of Donald Trump to Presidential office in the USA and the referendum to leave the EU in Britain have been described as evidence for an outbreak of new culture wars. The term \u2018culture wars\u2019 has been used to describe conflicts in late 19th<\/sup> century England and late 20th<\/sup> century America between secular and religious populations over issues such as gender and sexuality and the status of religious and scientific truth-claims. The rise of the self-styled new atheism was arguably part of the same phenomenon.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the linkage of Trump and Brexit to a new bout of culture wars has no obvious link to any religion-secular flashpoints. The 2016 report by Kirby Swales<\/a> on the Brexit vote by the National Centre for Social Research concluded that \u201cthe EU Referendum was highly divisive, highlighting a wide range of social, geographical and other differences in Great Britain. This was less a traditional left-right battle, and more about identity and values (liberalism vs authoritarianism). It is a strong sign that the so-called \u2018culture wars\u2019 of the US have arrived in Great Britain in earnest\u201d (2016: 27). Rich Lowry in The Guardian<\/em><\/a>\u00a0argued in similar fashion that Trump\u2019s election in the USA exposed new fissures around populism, immigration and nationalism. But, if the new culture wars do not reproduce the religious-secular flash-points of the past, what do they do?<\/p>\n

A key feature of the Trump and Brexit election campaigns were claims about fake news and alternative facts. If the arch-postmodernists Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard are to be believed, this is because the modern narrative of incremental progress and knowledge is breaking down\u2014if not, indeed, going into reverse. Where classical sociology predicted secularization\u2014a terminal loss of faith in religious institutions\u2014postmodern sociology predicts a loss of faith in all the other institutions as well, from the banks, universities, newspapers and courts to the politicians. The election of Trump and the Brexit vote point to this wider breakdown. The Occupy movement\u2014about which I\u2019ve conducted research in London and Hong and Kong<\/a> (Tremlett 2012 and 2016)\u2014registered global distrust in economic institutions. The camps that sprang up in cities around the world were attempts to find new sources of authenticity in speech and the face-to-face intimacies of camp life, and to imagine economies not in terms of competition, but rather cooperation. Ultimately, of course, the protests failed both in terms of their primary aim of bringing about political change to rein in the banks and in terms of their secondary aim of restoring peoples trust that they were part of a common society. But the movement did provide an imaginary which formed around the preference for close, horizontal relationships over distant, vertical or hierarchical ones.<\/p>\n

The new culture wars, then, may not be about religion, but they are about faith and loss of faith: the loss of faith in existing institutions to speak sincerely and the process of trying to discover something or someone new to place trust in.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bibliography:<\/p>\n

Baudrillard, J. (2007) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities<\/em>, (trans), P. Foss, J. Johnston, P.<\/p>\n

Patton and A. Berardini, Introduction, S. Lotringer, C. Kraus and H. El Kholti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).<\/p>\n

Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge<\/em>, (trans), G. Bennington and B. Masumi. Foreword by F. Jameson. Manchester: Manchester University Press.<\/p>\n

Tremlett, P-F. (2012) \u2018Occupied Territory at the Interstices of the Sacred: Between Capital and Community,\u2019 in Religion and Society,<\/em> 3: 130-141.<\/p>\n

Tremlett, P-F. (2016) \u2018Dissent in the Heart of the Capitalist Utopia: Occupy Hong Kong\u2019s Rite of Post-Territorial Place-Making,\u2019 in Sociology,<\/em> 50 (6): pp. 1156-1169.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note:\u00a0This post is modified version of a presentation given to the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance \u2018Cultures and the Psychosocial in CCIG Research\u2019 on May 4, 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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