Recent years have seen a revival of debates in Europe (and elsewhere) over the place of religion in civil society or public life. Instead, the proposed workshop will take a step back and ask, among other things, what it means to debate the place of something called “religion” in something called “civil society” or “public life”. The workshop’s aim is not simply to dismiss (in a deconstructive vein) such categories and the debates that they occasion, but to examine the consequences of particular ways of distinguishing between “religious” and “secular”. It matters, after all, whether a museum exhibit is considered cultural or religious; a crucifix on a necklace is deemed an expression of faith or a fashion accessory; shari’a law is regarded as integral to Islam or as another lawcode; a particular state is classified by Europe as secular or not; a minority is viewed as religious or ethnic; and a PhD thesis is considered religious or just about religion. We are looking for speakers to explore the effects of the way people in a particular context distinguish between religious and secular.

The workshop will build on a variety of recent events and publications, including an earlier workshop that took place at the University of Stirling in February, which established that people (including scholars) distinguish between the religious and the secular in different ways at different times and places. Instead of taking for granted the religious-secular distinction, we should therefore a) pay attention to how the people we study make the distinction, as well as b) reflecting on how we make the distinction ourselves as scholars. Speakers described how people distinguished between religious and secular practices in the contexts of Brazilian rice mills, health clinics in Ireland, Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, a Himalayan town and Madonna’s divorce. Some participants argued against using the distinction analytically while others defended its use by saying that we simply need to be careful, as with any analytical distinction.

While the Stirling workshop focused on the diversity of ways of distinguishing between religious and the secular and on the usefulness (or otherwise) of the distinction for analytical purposes, the proposed workshop will build on that by focusing on the consequences of particular ways of making the distinction. Some of the speakers at Stirling did touch on that. For example, in the opening session, Andrea Baumeister cited the feminist argument that the idea of “religious freedom” can serve to protect spheres defined as “religious” from the requirement of gender equality. Trevor Stack drew on that point to explain why the Catholic Church has found the religious-secular distinction quite congenial, but he also suggested several additional ways in which the Church turns the distinction to its advantage. We would like speakers in the June workshop to centre their attention on the various motives and effects, intended or otherwise, of making religious-secular distinctions. For example, Johan Rasanayagam will discuss the results of the authoritarian Uzbek state’s attempt to domesticate Islam as part of Uzbek tradition, and Edith Doron will describe controversies about labelling displays in a Brooklyn children’s museum as “cultural” or “religious”.

The workshop will also build on the volume Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, edited in 2007 by Tim Fitzgerald, and we hope that participants will look at the volume in advance of the workshop. For example, Abdulkader Ismail Tayob argued in his chapter that the Egyptian state harnessed the ulama into performing a “religious” function of moral oversight; James Cox noted that US officials defined Alaskan indigenous practices embedded in the land as “cultural” as opposed to “religious”, allowing the commoditization of the land; William Cavanaugh showed how variations on the theme of “religious violence” have been used historically to justify Western aggression, from the so-called “wars of religion” to the “war on terror”; James Pearson wrote on how Montagnards in the Vietnam War drew on the religious-secular distinction, learned from French colonials who were themselves blurring the distinction, to distinguish themselves as “Christians” from the “atheistic” Vietnamese, while drawing on the same religious-secular distinction to portray themselves as “culturally” distinct.

We would be interested, then, to hear how particular religious-secular distinctions play out in a range of contexts, including the following:

• how religious practices get distinguished from economic practices and, crucially, what rides on particular distinctions between religious and economic
• the work done by the idea of religion as something to be set aside (or kept private) when people act as citizens, including in the media and in politics
• what happens when religion gets defined in particular legal controversies, for example in distinguishing between religious and racial discrimination or in allowing religious exceptions to particular laws
• to what ends do particular legal and/or philosophical traditions delimit religious issues and/or religious arguments, including in the constitution of law and philosophy as such
• how and to what effect have religion and science been distinguished in the so-called Religion/Science debates, not least in the context of the Darwin bicentenary
• what the idea of the secular university does, including legitimating our scholarship, and whether or not our debates about the religious-secular distinction really call the secular university into question

We would also be interested in the consequences of resisting or refusing or ignoring particular religious-secular distinctions. Will Tuladhar-Douglas gave the example at the Stirling workshop of how Newar townspeople managed a distinction made by Tibetan incomers that they regarded as alien and inappropriate. Within academia, scholars such as Habermas continue to work on finessing the religious-secular distinction, but other scholars as different as the neo-traditionalist Hauerwas and the pragmatist Stout have tried to avoid the distinction, for example by treating “religion” loosely as just another set of traditions. Islamist scholars and activists have posed their own challenges by arguing, for example, that Islam embraces the whole of life. What follows from such positions? Repression? A different kind of politics and knowledge? A return to the medieval or a brave new post-secular? And what happens to notions of public and private and to domains such as law and economics?

The workshop will begin at 2 pm on Thursday 25^th June and end by 4.30 pm on Friday 26^th June. Accommodation will be available at King’s Hall http://www.abdn.ac.uk/kingshall/about/ for the Thursday night. For information about travel and about the city and region, see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/central/abdn/index.shtml

Prospective speakers are invited to email abstracts of around 200-400 words to the workshop coordinator, Trevor Stack (t.stack@abdn.ac.uk) by Monday 18^th May. Accommodation at King’s Hall will be provided for speakers, once accepted, but please indicate if you also wish to apply for funds to cover travel costs. Speakers from CINEFOGO institutions (see www.cinefogo.org for a list) should use their institutions’ grant to cover their travel costs, but speakers from institutions that are not CINEFOGO partners may apply for travel funds.

The workshop will help to prepare the ground for an international conference on the same topic, organised by Trevor Stack and Tim Fitzgerald, to be held at the British Academy on 14-16 January 2010.