Photo: mwfearnley (Flickr) "The majority of religious identities, I wouldn’t say they’re softening, but they’ve got very fluid boundaries, probably more fluid than ever before, actually, we assimilate lots into our religious identities."
Religions around the world are facing massive changes – changes concerned with authority, changes concerned with identity, changes concerned with tradition.
Professor Linda Woodhead thinks these changes came to a head in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In her work, she often imagines the pivot point being 1989.
“The fall of the Berlin Wall is a really obvious thing and that meant the grand Cold War ideologies of capitalism and communism were loosened,” Woodhead says, “And it was like a lid coming off and so a whole range of identities bubbled up to the surface; religious and ethnic identities people had thought had died but they hadn’t.”
Woodhead is a sociologist of religion at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
She says the opening of the Berlin Wall allowed for easier migration across Europe at the same time that, globally, migration was becoming more widespread.
As these flows of migration settled, they began to carve spaces for themselves in their new homes while maintaining connections to those they’d left behind. This was enabled, in part, by newly emerging communication technologies.
“They [new communication technologies] have really transformed things for religious people,” Woodhead says.
“And they mean that religious and cultural resources are open-sourced. Whereas, before, religious elites and religious leaders could control how the symbols were used and disseminated, on what occasions, in what ways, they can’t anymore. So, those religious symbols and those religious knowledges float free and that really dislocates a lot of power as well.”
Woodhead says where, before, religious leaders could maintain power by keeping some forms of religious knowledge secret, that’s no longer possible.
Faithful can now go to the internet and find information that once had been closely guarded – this, in turn, opens up religions to new interpretations, often more personal interpretations.
Some have questioned the validity of using 1989 as the watershed moment for the beginning of these religious changes – scholars studying change outside the West say watershed moments may have come at different, perhaps earlier, times in different societies.
They do agree with Woodhead, however, that religion is changing and changing in a sometimes unpredictable way.
“I think that’s really one of the fascinating things about studying religion in a global context,” Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change Director Hilary Kahn said after a talk Woodhead gave in which a bit of a debate sprung up around using 1989 as the pivot point for understanding religious change.
“Depending upon what cultural or historical context you’re working in,” Kahn continued, “your understanding of when change began may be different; but we all seem to agree that change, and even sometimes radical change, is taking place.”
Woodhead has spearheaded several large studies examining the intersections of religion and society, with a particular focus on Europe. She shared the findings of that work while a guest of the Center for the Study of Global Change and the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University in early April.
When asked if she agrees with pundits and other experts who say all this change is leading to a hardening of religious identities Woodhead quickly shakes her head.
It’s the opposite, she says.
“I think there is a hardening, but it’s of tiny minorities and it gets blown all out of proportion,” Woodhead says.
“The majority of religious identities, I wouldn’t say they’re softening, but they’ve got very fluid boundaries, probably more fluid than ever before, actually, we assimilate lots into our religious identities.”
Although, she notes, in places where there are active struggles over religious identity, boundaries are often less fluid – she points to the situations in Nigeria and Northern Ireland as examples of places where identities may have hardened.
One place that is often brought up during conversations about the hardening of identities is Europe as a whole.
The continent is struggling to understand just what it means to be “European” – that struggle shaped not only by a desire to hold onto some form of national identity, be it French or British or German, but also shaped by interactions with Europe’s Muslim inhabitants.
“Europe has had to really struggle with a really large Muslim population that is post-war and quite new and it’s huge, it’s way beyond anything in the States,” Woodhead says.
“So it’s easy to say that Europe’s got a real problem with Muslims, but given the speed at which how much has happened, given the size of the Muslim populations, and given that Europe’s a really small and crowded place, and given that it’s been Christian for 2-thousand years, actually I think a bit more credit ought to be given for how quickly our new Muslim populations are being integrated. But, it varies very much from country to country and the most secular have the most problems.”
Among the many projects Woodhead has worked on is the book Everyday Lived Islam in Europe, which she co-edited. The goal was to place Muslims within the larger fabric of European life.
“We were interested in exploring how Muslims in Europe are living out their religious lives,” Woodhead says.
She notes that most European Muslims are integrated, contributing members of the societies in which they live, which is often overlooked in discussions that focus on extremism or political Islam. So the group of researchers working on the project wanted to highlight the “everyday” aspect of Muslim lives.
“Let’s not just look at the religious elites and institutions,” she says they decided, “Let’s look at the ordinary people’s religion.”
Woodhead says while the book examines domestic Islam, inside the home, it also explores how spaces such as schools, prisons, and shopping malls all contribute to the creation of new understandings of Islam in Europe.
In addition to her work as a researcher, Woodhead has been instrumental in creating a public conversation about faith.
She writes an occasional column for The Guardian, as well as The Tablet magazine, in the UK and she helped develop the Westminster Faith Debates in that country as well.
“I really care about these issues and if you really think something matters you want to get heard by as many people as possible,” she says.
“I got so frustrated with the level of debate about religion, the public conversation about religion in Britain is very low, it’s terrible, so it’s as if all religious people are fanatical fundamentalists and full of misconceptions about religion and stereotypes. We’ve become quite religiously illiterate, actually.”
Woodhead says because of that religious illiteracy and because of the vitriolic nature of the debate, she felt compelled to wade in.
The only way to change something, she says, is to become involved and make sure your perspective is added to the dialogue.
Professor Linda Woodhead’s visit to Indiana University was made possible by the British Council’s Our Shared Future program.
Read More:
For more Muslim Voices updates, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!
View the original article here
