nef-vanleer-2007

Professor Detlef Pollack presented the NEF/van Leer conference with some data on secularisation in Europe: are we becoming less religious? can it be measured? is it getting faster or slower?
He contrasted a basic "secularisation hypothesis" - we are getting less interested in all things religious - with two other hypotheses: the "market model", whereby competition for the supply of religious goods is hotting up, and that competition leads to less activity in established churches; and the much more radical "individualization hypothesis" according to which religion can be viewed as a bundle of goods which are now being supplied in all sorts of different ways. As Professor Pollack says:

I'd love to find lists of what that bundle might actually comprise - but one thing it certainly involves is the control of the calendar. The oldest archeological relics we have of priestly ritual involve calendars - machines to measure when the critical annual events of a primitive agrarian society should occur. Each religion defines its year dot just as much as its annual rhythm of feasts and fasts. The Ise Shrine in Japan has been rebuilt every 20 years, each time identically, since 4BC, to represent simultaneously both renewal and permanence. With modern individualization - in Northern Europe, at least - the secular birthday won out over the Saint's day as the sanctioned, private beat to the family's year. By telling us what the important, recurrent milestones of a year should be, a public calendar sets social priority - be they planting, harvesting and fasting, or forgiving, remembering, fighting or defeat.

I like the Individualization hypothesis - even if Professor Pollack found it hard to find evidence for it in his current work. It certainly makes sense of all the land-grab over the calendar that we can see today. The anniversary of 9/11 is coming back; the deca-versary of Diana's death made an attempted grab at the British calendar; the quinqua-versary of the European Union has been marked as a year dot for some ... and Ethiopia is celebrating its own millenium tomorrow.

Gilles Kepel, French scholar of Islam (and openDemocracy author) presented us with a paradox: British ``multi-culti'' gave home born terrorism; French republicanism, fired by ``la Mission Civilisatrice de la France'' (the civilising vocation of France), produced banlieues riots of disaffected youth, but no dangerous terrorism. Are there lessons to be drawn?

Kepel offers the argument that the 7/7 bombers came from communities that had, by the policy of multi-culturalism, been allowed to retain their own community structures. These structures were not ready to accommodate the second and third generation rebels, some of whom turned to the radicalism that had been given friendly bearth in Londonistan from the 1970s onwards. The two together made some young men prepared to become terrorists, while the old community structures were unwilling to denounce them because of Britain's Iraq involvement.

This was Professor Jose Casanova's contention in the opener of the Van Leer Institute/Network of European Foundations conference on Religion and Democracy in Europe. It's not the economy, stupid ... it's secularism.

He makes a convincing case: we start with a liberal, secularist world view that ses the European nation struggling to emerge out of the clutches of a fused Church and Monarchy of the high middle ages, through the reformation and elnlightenment which together create the three autonomous spheres of religion, politics and science. This is associated to the development of freedom, the possibility of self-realisation and democracy. Any new incursions of religion out of its well defined, private, box should be treated with great suspicion according to this view.