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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to the new books network. I'm your host, Shnaer Zommen-Newfield. Religious literacy has become a popular concept for navigating religious diversity in public life.
In the politics of religious literacy, education and emotion in a secular age, published by real academic publishers in 2022, Justine Ellis challenges commonly held understandings of religious literacy as an inclusive framework for engaging with religion in modern, multi-faith democracies. Justine Ellis earned a PhD in theology in 2020 from Oxford University Press and is a scholar working on the intersection of religion, secularism and public policy. I'm so glad her new book has brought her to our program. Welcome.
Hi, Solomon. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you to you and to the new books network for hosting me today.
Our pleasure. So to get started, could you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to write this work? Certainly. So by way of background on what motivated this project, I would say that for the past decade or more, I've intentionally set out to inhabit essentially the borderlands between the Academy and policy spaces moving back and forth between these really two areas with the intention of trying to bridge these sites of knowledge production and also of action.
So I study religion while I was an undergrad here in New York City at Burger College at Columbia University and over the ensuing years, I worked in a variety of nonprofit and policy spaces. And during that time, my specific interest in religious literacy, which in within the context of secularity really came into sharper focus while I was working specifically in intergroup and interfaith policy contexts. So part of this and this came into again, the sharper focus for me was that scholarship to me has always had public stakes. But of course, what does that actually entail?
So when I decided to go off and as I mentioned to my PhD, I wanted to make sure that my specialist training helped rather than hindered my ability to address some of these issues of wider concern. So as I mentioned before the PhD, while I was working in these policy spaces, part of my work and portfolio focused on interreligious and intergroup outreach among young professionals. And I remember taking on the task of writing up a religious literacy guidebook for enhancing interreligious coalition building. And part of that work during that time was bringing together Muslim and Jewish young professionals to advance particular advocacy agendas in these interfaith intergroup coalition settings.
But what I found was that some of this work was encountering unforeseen obstacles because it was operating under a model of interfaith engagement that in some cases presupposed clear cut self-identification. So in other words, the idea that young people were self-identifying in straightforward ways as say Muslim or Jewish. And although that was the case for many, what I discovered was that young people were simply not identifying uniformly in those ways. And that is something we are seeing increasingly.
So that sent me down the theory rabbit hole. And I went off and had this wonderful once-in-lifetime opportunity to go to the UK to Oxford, to do my doctorate as you mentioned in the Faculty of Theology and Religion there. And I was able to pursue a project on religious literacy within the context of rising religiously unaffiliated populations. And I looked primarily at US and UK examples of this growing transnational conversation.
So while I was there, I'll say a little bit more about this. I latched onto the idea of affect theory. And I'd be happy to say more about this approach later in our conversation. But overall, for the uninitiated, I would say broadly speaking, that theories of affect really call us to consider the roles of bodies, feelings, emotions, and environments.
Basically, those forces that go beyond cognition, language, alone. So my guiding question when I started approaching this project was, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about lived religion, but increasingly, scholarship is thinking about what does lived, felt, and embodied secularism look like from practicals perspective and in my particular interest within educational and policy spaces. So what kinds of understandings of religion and secular, you know, come into play in public policy production. And what I found increasingly was that this popular concept of religious literacy provided a very good illustrative case.
And I would say problem space for examining these questions surrounding the changing dynamics of religion and secularism in public life. And I would just say chronologically that, you know, I've had the privilege and excitement of kicking around these ideas during my doctorate. And afterwards, as an American Council of Learning and Societies, ACLS postdoctoral fellow, and most recently as an advisor at a government ethics nonprofit in a DC based policy space. So I will, you know, enough about my personal motivations and training.
I should probably, you know, as a conversation, say a little bit more about religious literacy to kick us off. Yes. Well, thank you for that sort of introduction helps kind of situate you and your experience and interests. And yes, the next question, the first question I have is what is religious literacy?
What exactly does that term refer to? And that as you say, what is religious literacy? That is the question. And it's quite contagious.
I will say that I'll preface that I comment by saying that as a concept, it becomes so ubiquitous, so pervasive that I'm confident that, of course, that you've heard of it, that anyone tuning in has probably come across this term. It's very likely. And if you want to become religiously learned, there's a wide array of options that have become available in recent years. There are books intended for popular readership, online courses and certifications for students and professionals.
And these religious literacy sources and basically everywhere you turn. And often this conversation comes up when challenges of living together in pluralistic societies arise. Policy makers and educators very often call for increased religious literacy in education, policy, journalism, workplace context and foreign service and many other places as well. And the way I like to characterize it is that this is something that various advocates for religious literacy acknowledge that there hasn't been an agreed upon definition that has emerged over the years.
But I think one thing is clear is that the concept has become what I will call a buzz term rather than a buzz word. It's a buzz term with lasting power. And it's been used in popular media and there's even ample space dedicated to it in professional associations with a wide reach like AAR, the American Academy of religion. So it's becoming part of this wider and increasingly prevalent conversation around public scholarship itself.
So what I will say is that religious literacy is really surges its tool, conceptual for organizing public understandings of religion. So what I wanted to look at was what this policy conversation assumes and what are some of the dynamics it configures and potentially who it excludes along the way. So I'm happy to say a bit more about what drew me in here. Sure, well I'm curious.
When we're thinking talking about religious literacy, are we talking about providing certain content, let's say in the educational context we talk about primary school or are we talking about providing students with certain content about religions? Or are we talking about providing particular intellectual skills to them? That is such a crucial question. And in the book I put together and have been a conversation with other scholars around this particular typologies.
So I would say that for the most part the conversation assumes that in many cases that religious literacy is a public that it's needed for associational life and local democracies and that we should work to kind of find the optimal combination of a misbose to your question of values, content knowledge and skills that combine to make people religiously literate. And the conversation is really very caught up with the necessity or legal viability of the project, but I think less involved in the implication or lived aspects. So what I would say about it is that religious literacy has served as this educational and civic endeavor and is often associated with it again this combination of knowledge and meaningfully with religion. And it's coming within this context of an apparent resurgence of religion.
And it comes out very often you will have conversations around religious literacy in which it's framed as helping people get religion or encounter religion on the ground. Those have become really common refrains. And what I noticed about this and this is what another thing that drew me into this work and that I found so intriguing was that the conversation so often centers on how to increase levels of religious literacy. How do you promote it and how do you do it more effectively and how do you have more of it?
And what I found was that, and I talk about this in the book, is that so often participants in this conversation really fall into two opposing camps. Then you've got the proponents, you have the detractors, and I say this without painting everyone with too broad a brush, but many fall into the category of advocating for a much more robust, readily available religious literacy. And then on the other end, on the other hand, you have a much smaller camp that finds the concept unworkable and undesirable because they see religious literacy as either bringing in kind of a hidden and unacceptable faith formation advocacy agenda or simply downplaying religion by teaching it and potentially dispassionate academic ways. And I found this tension really troubling these two opposing camps.
And that's partially why I set out to look at religious literacy policy proposals, educational curricula, and also workplace case studies because I really, through the course of this research, I became convinced that there had to be not necessarily a middle ground, something mediating between these two positions, but that we had to cover different grounds. And for the book, is my attempt in this conversation to take a step back so to speak. And I think as the title implies, the politics of religious literacy, education, and emotion in a secular age, it makes that case that we need to think about what religious literacy advocacy itself promotes. And this was intended very much as a theory based in practice and a reparative project, thinking about what the conversation assumes about these constructive categories of religion and secular.
And I use, and we can talk about this a bit, I use a framework of critical secularism studies and affect theory to think about how religious literacy functions as state discourse, because it is so frequently advertised as a tool. As you mentioned, for navigating this religiously plural sphere in multi-faith democracies. All right, so speaking of affect theories, how could you tell us a little bit more about affect theory and how does it relate to the issue of religious literacy? Certainly.
And I think this was something, these were insights that I found really core to this work and the framing of this project. And I think the way into it for me was looking at it through secularism studies. So thinking about the concept of the secular, I think, provided some clues into some of the issues around inclusivity at the intersection of religion and public policy. And what has happened in scholarship, this project has essentially been termed the affective turn within secularism studies.
And I will back that by explaining what I mean by this. And again, for the uninitiated here, that I found that there's this narrative of decline that underpins a lot of religious literacy advocacy, as in thinking about the decline of religious affiliation, participation, and understanding, and even basic familiarity. So the thinking tends to go something along these lines that if religion and what people mean by the concept of religion, perhaps later, and that could take up its own recording, I'm sure. But breaking that off for a moment, that if the idea of religion isn't central to everyday life, then deciphering its meaning requires training.
And a common argument in favor of increasing religious literacy kind of invokes this widespread lack of knowledge about religious tropes that result potentially from a lack of exposure to an understanding of identifiably religious people, and identifiably religious population. So I think that the rise of religious literacy coincides with this increase in the number of people who identify as not having religion. And I'm convinced that that is not a coincidence. I would say that on the theory front, going back to the secularism side of things and making that connection that bridge to affect, is that religious studies as an academic discipline has so often in recent years, but has increasingly emphasized the role of a lived religion, thinking about what it means to embody religion, thinking outside of these text-based spaces.
But increasingly, I think scholarship is just suggesting that we need to concentrate on lived secularism too. And thinking about what that actually means. So interventions folks like Monique Schir, Nadia Fideal, Brigitte, Johansson, they've noted that critical secularism studies in the past is moved from the study of secularization as a political process. Thinking about the role of politics and institutions to more of a study of the secular itself as a lived practice.
And these kinds of works, and there are plenty of others in the space, but I named that particular work, that these work straw attention to kind of thinking about what are some of the norms, customs habits, then inform how we live today. And affect theory, as I mentioned, and would be happy to say more, calls us to pay attention to these sorts of configurations that are beyond language and reason and text alone. And I will add here that one really crucial way into this debate is through a focus on the body. And so for example, a dear thing, Charles Hirsch kind of asked this really compelling question that I absolutely latched onto this, which is, is there a secular body?
And for someone like him, the secular isn't just a political doctrine. And instead, raising this question of whether it's possible to even know if someone is secular and whether there are characteristically identifiable ways of being secular in the world. So living in secular ways might be about beliefs, but it might also be about actions, habits, or even the way we inhabit our environments. So these kinds of questions are what prompted what has been called the embodiment turn or affective turn in critical secularism studies, would reorient these conversations towards lived and embodied experiences of the secular.
And these resources suggest that our decision making results from dynamics outside of language and reason alone, and they point out the ways in which our actions, our attitudes, our attachments really take shape, not only at this cognitive level, but also at a visceral level. So that's, you know, taking together, it raises the question of whether, you know, does it actually feel different to be secular from being religious? And is it even possible at all to differentiate these two states of being? So I think that that's something that really surged for me while doing this work around a project that is based on the public study of religion.
What does that mean? So those are some places where I picked up on in this conversation. Right. And so just to know, to emphasize for people who are not familiar with this topic, as you were saying, that often the way that some sort of prominent secular people or atheists are not familiar with this topic, that often the way that some sort of prominent secular people or atheists famous, atheists in recent years, the way that they describe themselves and present themselves, and the way that many people in the public think about them is that the idea of secularism is based on certain, you know, theories, certain ideas, and that it's a sort of rejection of religious doctrine based on rationalism and so on.
And so there are some things that are not like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins and others are often associated with this kind of sometimes called a new atheist, and they're associated with this kind of discourse, that the reason why they're atheists, the reason why their secular is because of these particular quote unquote rationalist principles, or, you know, use of the scientific method and so on. And essentially, if I understand correctly, the people who are studying, you know, because of critical secular studies are basically arguing that may be part of the secular experience, but there's also an embodied part, there's also an emotional part to the experience of secularism, that it's not purely a kind of logical, rational experience. There's also other parts to this phenomenon and they want to make sure that those parts are not ignored. Absolutely, and I think that was a really helpful, so council summary of where this discipline stands and the two recent emotions are not necessarily intention, but so often it gets framed and figured that way in public conversation.
So thinking about this affective current and secularism studies, I think is helpful, and obviously there's a lot of very good and emerging scholarship and much more work to be done on this front, but having that initial conversation around thinking about how many of our actions are shot through with potentially reason and emotion, and what does that mean for those two things, and how do we go about conducting scholarship without uncritically reproducing these mind body dualism, the reason and emotion binaries, and you see them surging all the time. One area where this comes into particular focus is, and I found this throughout, is in the area of pedagogy of teaching, and this was something that I found so compelling in this book and in this project, and I think it came into sharper focus, especially in US context. So I'll give you an example here that I think a lot of times, especially in US public school classrooms, thinking about constitutional constraints, a lot of times people are really concerned about running afoul of constitutional constraints in public school classroom settings, and so educators and potentially rightly so have come to fear some of these emotive polls associated with teaching about religion, and this anxiety surrounding emotion embodiment can come at a cost. So I'll give one example that I drawn in the book and you can mention here, is that I think experiential learning within religious literacy is really an illustrative case.
So back in 2013, I can't believe I did this, but that was a decade ago. It's pretty hard to imagine, but the stakes have not changed at all, that there's an incident that ended up getting called a burka gate, and a kid do not that is actually what it was called, and it caused these ripples across popular media in the US because photos surfaced of school children wearing full body coverings as part of a world religions class. And what ended up happening is that while when reflecting on and thinking about best practices or takeaways from this media field outrage that ensued, what happened was a book and I picked up on this in the book, this is a well established journal, Education Journal, which she does, she puts together a series of recommendations, and she urges educators to steer clear of experiential exercises because in her understanding, in her word, you put on religious guard, so to speak, you come close to simulating a religious act. And again, these are her words that you're close to simulating a religious act.
And for me, this was so compelling and troubling because I think this particular note of caution says so much. And the way this plays out is that it's saying that you're putting yourself in someone else's issues, and that is dangerous. And why is that dangerous? It's dangerous because in this logic, if you're operating within this logic that bodies and by extension, and it goes in that order, and by extension, our minds can so easily move into this territory of possible proselytization, but as I mentioned before, this constitutionally impermissible faith formation, and I say that with the caveat that I always mention in all contexts, not just academic ones, that I am not a lawyer, I'm not a legal scholar, but thinking about these broader movements, and I think according to this logic, and this is something that I saw running through so much of religious literacy, advocacy, and policy proposals, was that thinking and reading could help you maintain a critical academic distance.
And if you read about it in a book, that's already because you're not participating in the same way. But the moment that emotions or bodily connections to our environments factor into this wider calculus, now all of a sudden, and very suddenly we've run from this supposedly and purportedly safe and contained world of language and text into a much, much messier, and uncontained area of human emotions and bodies. This is the place where, and this is something that I tried to keep in front of mind as I was working on this project, where theory meets practice in these very challenging and compelling ways. And I think that that's something that I picked up on, and I hope that others who are operating in this space have been paying attention to these kind of ambivalent approaches to the body within Western intellectual history, has led to this privileging and perhaps I'm condensing and oversimplifying here, but this privileging of cognition over embodiment and prioritizing, thinking, over feeling.
And we can see this coming into play in religious literacy case studies. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails, the key criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to wear me when I play at the park.
We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer. That's how we protect Ontario for all of us. Learn how at ontario.ca.c farontario paid for by the government of Ontario. Right, I mean it's interesting to me, I think this topic is so fascinating and I think what you were just describing that there's a kind of invisible, or not so invisible, line in the sand, where some proponents of, or critics of religious literacy would argue that if you're on one side of that line, it's permissible.
But if you cross that line, suddenly you've ventured into unacceptable territory and that the line in the sand is the line between cognition and emotion or doing something sort of physical with the body. So if you're reading a book about a religion, that's permissible. But if you're wearing a religious garb from a religion, and I was thinking about what if you're eating food, let's say, before Passover, if you have non-Jewish students, eat matzah and say, hey, not that we're making a seder Passover celebration, but just as an experiential thing, hey, this is something that religious Jews eat on Passover and Passover is coming up. Here, everyone in the class could take a piece of matzah.
I don't know if anyone's ever done this. I'm just thinking out loud here. And you could each take a little piece and just sort of experience on some level what it might feel like to be a Jew who's celebrating Passover. And you're saying that some people feel that that is crossing a line that's just unacceptable.
And I grew up in a very ultra-worz-a-dok-s-Jewish community in Brooklyn, and in the community that I grew up in, the idea of learning about other religions. Even that was considered completely unacceptable because to have one's mind entertain ideas about a different religion, even if it's not in a sort of devotional context where maybe you might actually embrace that other faith. But just as a kind of intellectual exercise would be considered completely unacceptable. And I'm also reminded that right now we're living through this in the US.
We're living through this major crisis moment where politically and culturally conservative states are banning certain books or banning or making it difficult for students to have access to public libraries and the books that they contain. And so again, that seems like a very clear expression of the idea that even to think about other bidden topics, whether they're other religions or sexuality or whatever it is, just to think about them intellectually is already crossing a line and is unacceptable. I'm so glad to raise that. And thank you for sharing about your background as well because I think that this puts some of these issues into sharper focus because what you're describing and what you're citing is it's not simply knowledge production but knowledge accessibility.
And where I think I saw from this, you know, within the context of religious literacy debates is that this is, as they're saying, this place where theory meets practice. I think a place where this really comes into sharper focus is thinking about a particular formulation that I found helpful when doing this research, which is not a vengever's phrasing and he's written extensively about affect theory and its context within religious studies. And he talks about what he terms the linguistic fallacy. And again, the linguistic fallacy which presupposes that decision making results directly from language.
So the idea that essentially buying into the linguistic fallacy entails what he, what he for term as misunderstanding religion is merely a byproduct of language that when you're talking about so this privileging of language, using can lead to textualism and it can lead to essentially an over emphasis on the role of spoken language and the written word. And I think what we're still is that it can cause us to overlook these additional factors that come into decision making, knowledge production and knowledge growth. And as you even cited something along the lines of even knowledge accessibility, what gets what it's taught and where and not so often the conversations that animate public discussion just who, what is acceptable, what is taboo, what are we allowed to teach and talk about. And I think within the book and I do talk about this is that the idea, I think a lot of the religious literacy initiatives propose particular strategies for teacher training.
And I think that really helps crystallize some of these issues. So I can give another, another quick example here that an early proponent of religious literacy, so this is, there have been many different phases and instances of it. And in the talk I do a little bit of scene setting, I talk about the rise of religious literacy and in my understanding from what I was able to reconstruct, you know, how did this come into being as far as I could tell. And in one of the earlier instantiations and earlier iterations, this proponent of religious literacy comments really frequently about the concepts of neutrality and fairness in teaching about religions within the US.
And again, it's important to note that this is within US school contexts. I did look at this from a UK angle as well and looked at these transnational super national texts as well. But primarily I kept the conversation angles on in large part because that is where a lot of conversation is taking place. So I'll just add that as a note.
But what happened was when this, when this person, when this scholar was discussing teacher training as you know, teacher training is an approach to the topic of religion. This person really contends that the neutrality that's morally required isn't one that prevents a teacher or a text from taking sides. But instead, and he says the words that like, what really has to happen is that you need to have something that respects the money, uses the term the moral integrity of the student by not requiring them to agree. So in this logic and this understanding that the text can be as out there or as you know, can simply suggest of a particular position, but we need to respect students' moral integrity to make their own decisions.
And I think what's really significant about the way this person understands is that it's emphasizing that this concept of neutrality derives from students' ability to make up their own minds based on linguistic inputs and potentially dispassionate reason to assessment. And I would not, and again, not to paint everything with a broad brush, but I think this particular statement and understanding highlights and calls attention to some of the potential cognitiveist biases underlying religious literacy proposals because in this framework, teachers' attitudes, whether you convey them non-verbally or you say something explicitly, in this view, play very much a limited role in conveying ideas that reason, autonomy, and individual discernment are the forces that act as buffers, and that's what protects students from possible emotive polls. So I think revisiting what we were talking about earlier, that what ends up happening within religious literacy is that it highlights that there's this potentially misleading opposition between reason and emotion and lying body that play out in real world context, and you have all of these consequences that come along with it. So what ends up happening is that arguments in favor of religious inclusion use the grammar and sometimes some of the preconceptions that come along with secular liberalism, that can elevate rationality, neutrality, and critical distance, and what we're seeing and why I found that the religious literacy test case so illustrative is that we're seeing that it's not quite so unique to, it doesn't map on quite as neatly as potentially previously thought.
Right, and it seems like the way that you're sort of critiquing the discourse on religious literacy, it seems to parallel the kind of general critique against quote unquote objectivity, you know, in general. So if you think about the idea that teachers in primary school or university professors should be quote unquote objective or unbiased, and that was certainly a mantra and a mindset for a long time, and then scholars more recently started to challenge this idea and say, well, actually, is it even possible for people to be fully objective? They could try to be dispassionate, and they could try to be rigorous, and they could try to, you know, martial evidence and describe the evidence that they have for their particular position, is it possible for a teacher or a professor to be fully objective in their analysis and description of a given topic? And it seems like there's a similar kind of dynamic going on when we think about religious literacy.
It's interesting that you, that you raised, you know, thinking about objectivity, and in so many different ways that neutrality or objectivity is often the centerpieces of these conversations, and in so many ways, I've become increasingly convinced that that might actually obscure some of what is going on, and I'll say a bit more. And I hope I've gotten this quote right, but a kind of a prominent affect theorist, Greg Seigworth, he puts it this way, he says that pedagot, and I mentioned this in the book, that pedagotgy is affect's first lesson. So again, pedagotgy is affect's first lesson. And my read on that or my interpretation of that is that affect's, in other words, they teach us.
They instruct, they inform, and, you know, engage our feelings, senses, and emotions. And so coming, and that goes back to these mind-body tooling, that it's not so clear cut. So this goes back to your question or comment around objectivity, that is something that is really coming to the fore increasingly nowadays, but it was something that is shot through all of religious literacy discourse as well. So I think this is a place where affect theory, having those theoretical frameworks and seeing the places where the theory plays out in practice can complicate this picture and can show the ways that, you know, are we, of the question is, are we really, you know, paraphrased?
Others? Are we really learning? Are we really learning when we're being taught? You know, how do we know these places where we learn particular things?
And I do mention this in the book where it's like, are we, let's talk about sites where we learn to, are we, where are we learning to be liberal subjects? Where are we learning these things? And sometimes it's part of a very explicit program of civics instruction, we're learning about democracy, and there's this distinction just drawn between learning about democracy and learning for democracy, learning to elevate those ends. And that's not, I probably thought of, you know, there's a lot of work around whether or not that's the right thing to be doing.
That's outside of a lot of scope of what I'm looking at, the ways in which this is happening. And what are some of those things that often go unacknowledged? How can we, first of all, start acknowledging them and think about how that would configure our pedagogical, our teaching spaces? And if we do it to yourself, what are those implications for teaching, for teaching or training, and more broadly for civics education in this moment of increasing attention to our shared civic life?
Right, I think it's interesting to think about what is the relationship or the boundary between learning about a religion and learning, you know, to be part of a given religion. You know, so again, just thinking in a sort of concrete way, if you have a school teacher that's teaching her class about Christianity, what would it be like to teach the students so that they understand something about the nature of Christianity versus teaching them in order to potentially sort of get them to embrace Christianity or a particular version of Christianity? Absolutely. And I think something that I learned or I think a preconception that I had or one of my initial hypotheses going into this project when I was in the early stages was that going the comparative case study angle, looking at US versus UK, looking at their very, very different, dritical frameworks, their church state formations and educational spaces as well, where you have, you know, UK, you have faith schools and a faith professional training as part of that, whether or not people are assimilating this or paying attention or having that become part of their identity and faith formation is another story.
But I came into this project with the presupposition that religious literacy would look very different on either side of the pond. And I'm sure there are others who might tell me on this, but what did surprise me was the extent to which the conversations were quite similar. And I think one potential factor around that is that the proponents of religious literacy are in conversation with one another. So it is increasingly an anglophone conversation.
So that may have been one of the reasons why I found it to be so similar, but I think the differentiating markers or the kind of typologies that came in here are, I think, the biggest differentiators are things around values, skills or content knowledge. And I think a lot of increasingly proponents and advocates of religious literacy are trying to bring all of those together in one. But historically, you can take a look back at it and see that certain proponents could be seen as falling into particular camps. So for me, that was the differentiator rather than the varying geographic context.
So that was something that had surprised me when going into this project. Right. And speaking of the geographical context, how can you tell us a little bit about the history of the role that religion played in American public schools before the early 1960s? Oh my goodness.
That would, I think that might be its own segment. But I will say, for my purposes, what I ended up doing was doing a very, very short, and I would urge for anyone who takes the time and so kindly reads this book, I do dedicate a small amount of space to framing this. As I think I mentioned previously, what ends up happening is that I trace this rise of religious literacy that I think coincides with a wider recognition around the role of religiously unaffiliated populations. So that's something that is kind of the more that sets the stage for the much more recent history.
But if you think about religious literacy in context, that there's this long-standing classroom history around particular US considerations. There's a lot of critical scholarship around this as well, around Supreme Court rulings, cases like Abington School District versus Shemp, which is, so these Abington cases gets often cited as this watershed moment within religion and American education. So this is a 1963 United States Supreme Court decision that you're talking about? That's right.
And this so often gets held up as kind of an example of this watershed moment within religion, and people who are much greater legal knowledge or under eduard, you know, scholars of religion and education, religion and law, you know, have a variety of opinions about the weight that should be placed on this particular marker and there are plenty of other cases. But could you just say briefly, what was the basic ruling in that case for people that are not familiar with it? Sure. And I think what was important here is that what in this case revolved around basically the role that the Bible would play in American public education and this opinion that got set down in terms of that, you know, the emotional Bible readings, you know, often performed really profoundly as part of these mandatory mourning assemblies were unconstitutional.
So that so as part of that, there's a legacy of this ruling that had put an end, at least ostensibly to devotional use of Bible in nation's public education settings. But, and this is where a lot of people who are making the case of religious literacy trace this genealogy or trace this history is that, and there are obviously very divergent opinions on what's actually entailed, but that this ruling didn't necessarily seek to eliminate this kind of text of the Bible. And I say that not as a monolith, but you know, in this interpretation, you know, from American classrooms that even though the court did ban devotional readings as part of this program, it did leave room for religion's inclusion in public school curricula. So what ended up happening is that, and there are very scenarios around this, and this is something that I get into too much in the book because it's just seen setting, but, and there are plenty of other scholars who have really built into these questions around again, whether or not this is the right origin story for religion and American education.
But the conversation tended to third around, you know, religion and public school curriculum, how do you do it in constitutionally permissible ways, and how do you do it as part of a kind of a secular program of education, what would that look like? And of course, going back to our earlier question, that, you know, those, they're very, very different considerations in contexts like the UK, where you have these faith schools and you have these councils, what they call staying advisory councils for RE for religious education, and it's the, and they call them sacres. So they come up with, you know, locally devised syllabi based on local stakeholders. So you end up with like a locally agreed syllabus for kind of, and sometimes a goal is faith formation, although whether that happens in practice again is a different story.
But so I came into this project thinking about some of these different and thought about some of the kind of court, Supreme Court cases as simply seen setting for the later conversation that I was trying, that I was staging around rising in very recent years, rising recognition of rising religiously unaffiliated populations and what that would mean for programs of education and identity and something like religious literacy that, although I do talk a fair amount about school and public schools and by public school, I mean in the US definition of, you know, state sponsored schooling. And what does that look like? So it does take place in places like classrooms, but I think more broadly. And this is where religious literacy really becomes to me so interesting and tricky is that so the focus of it so often is outside of those classroom settings.
What does religious literacy look like in journalism, in public service, in higher education, in workplace context. And I'd spend a lot of time in the book thinking about what this would look like, you know, playing out in, in work, I mean, like, I guess against the reg, I guess the backdrop of this increasing recognition that workplaces are increasingly global and what does that, and what does that look like in practice. So taking the conversation away from schools with a recognition that that is a lot of its history and into various sites where religious literacy is operative. And again, you know, recognizing that religious literacy itself is fairly broad as a term.
And this is something that proponents have recognized self-consciously and do, and a lot of folks do offer different definitions, but recognize that there are various schools of thought within this conversation. Right. Right. Let me ask you, shifting gears a bit.
How does Charles Taylor's formulation of secularity relate to the issue of religious literacy? I'm so I'm glad you asked that because that is the question that I had while building kind of the theoretical scaffolding of this book. And the way I saw this playing out and partially because I think that a lot of early proponents of religious literacy draw on similar arguments, Charles Taylor, big massive figure in kind of secularism studies and critical secularism studies. And there's even an extent to which these kinds of works are becoming almost canonical in what was once a new study.
So I think what I saw, I'll back this up before talking about Taylor by saying that again, the earlier some of the earlier proponents of religious literacy talk about religion's inclusion in school and they use, you know, they frame it in terms of how the, as they see at the public school curriculum, basically ignores religion as what they term a live option for making sense of the world here and now. That, and of course, people will learn about religion as, I believe this is a term they use as a museum piece as something that was once historically relevant but no longer has the same relevance in residence. And where I found Charles Taylor's works are helpful. And you're this massive for those who haven't gone through it and sat with it, it is a massive tone called a secular age.
And I promise you I will not attempt to narrate that the contours of that book and that argument. But what I did find useful for kind of for my own purposes and for this particular study was his kind of conception of his formulation of secularity, three, as he calls it. And he talks about this to the context of what he was the imminent frame, thinking about how, you know, religion in his understanding. And I don't want to oversimplify this because there are a lot of critiques of this and also attendance to the nuances within Taylor's own argument.
But thinking about how he asked this question of what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age and then his conception of secularity, three, which in his understanding characterizes modernity, that it comes to, to, to be in where, you know, it's a set of can for him a set of conditions of belief that put him into what he terms like this naive acknowledgement of the transcendent or goals or claims that go beyond human flourishing. So he asked, you know, what does it mean? And I'm paraphrasing here, but that he was virtually impossible not to believe in God in around, you know, 1500 in our Western society while in writing around 2000, I think it became out in 2007 that, you know, many of us, you know, find this not only easy but inescapable. So that was our, that's paraphrasing Taylor.
And he does presume that, you know, that belief in God was practically invariant, but its observation, you know, has, has resonance and brings true that, you know, according to him, about 500 years ago that belief in God, and he does, and this is again, this is a belief-based metric, but that belief in God would have been widely accepted as a natural state, whereas today it is one possibility among many others. And that to me was the key, the thinking about whether, and again, whether we want to use belief as a particular metric, there have been a lot of critiques of that that I might share, but that, you know, thinking about what happens when religious belief or we can broaden that out to say identity or even awareness is one possibility among many others, that it's not simply a, and I don't know that it ever was, but it's not simply an invariant or the default. And where this comes into play in religious literacy is again, going back to those conversations that I mentioned or those proposals that I mentioned around religion, just being this kind of op-museum key, something that is not a possibility in the present. And you'll get this, one of the kind of things that really struck me that I latched onto was, again, one of the proponents of religious literacy talks about it as basically how religion can come into conversation as part of this wire, but it has to come into, not conflict, but into competition with other points of view.
So there was a wider question around basically airtime, what views get appropriate airtime? And the implicit message behind that was that, you know, if people are simply not exposed to religious perspectives, and again, we can brag off what that might mean, but if people aren't exposed to this, then they can't possibly make that choice. So I saw that playing into this narrative around deliberative democracy and around inclusion. So thinking goes that in order for religion, that one, religion would need to be included, and two, it would need to be presented in a way that it could enter into, and I believe the words use or sort of intellectual competition, or the rough and natively, the quote actually was the rough and tumble of intellectual competition, which carries with it its own presuppositions around how decision making is made and formed.
So I think that's where drawing on Taylor is really, really helpful. And the other piece of, there are many, many, many very pieces of Taylor's work and argument, and I think a lot of scholarship has built on it and critiqued it and moved past it in certain aspects, but also continues to draw from it. But Taylor uses the term kind of subtraction stories, one thing about it. We're thinking about how the secular is not this open space, that's just the absence characterized by the absence of religion, that if you simply subtract religion, you're not left with nothing.
And that's an insight that so many different scholars have built on and run with. Yeah, I should just say, so my academic work thus far focuses on people who grew up in the ultra orthodox Jewish community and then left it. And so I actually use Taylor's concept or his critique of secularism as a subtraction story in my own work to argue that the idea that secularism is just an absence of religion, it's just this void and is incorrect. So if you look at people who grew up in a very strict orthodox Jewish environment and I'd argue the same kind of thing operates in other communities and faiths as well, where if people leave a very strict religion, they're not just left with no religion.
They're left with a particular reformulation and sometimes subversion of the religious ideas, principles, practices, and feelings that they acquired in their original community. And so anyway, I think it's a very powerful idea of understanding secularism as, I mean, historically, that's what Taylor's talking about when we think about secularism in the Western world, it grows out of and is influenced by religious ideas that were dominant when secularism was developing. And so when we think about secularism today, Taylor would argue and it sounds like you're arguing that secular ideas and also as you're talking about the embodiment of secular feelings and secular, you know, other aspects of secular identity are themselves influenced by religious concepts and religious life. And I would say, I would, I know I'm absolutely, I want to learn more about your work on this.
It sounds like we've so much more to discuss, pretend to even offline on this. But what I would say is that I would align myself more and this project more with the later scholarship that I was built on this work, critique it, sat with it, but on the question of the secular body thinking about those embodied, embedded environmental practices, what does that look like? So I would say that, you know, I'll give an example of, for example, theorists like Lois Lee have talked about what she refers to as the substantial secular, that it's something that comes with its own orientations, attitudes and attachments that arise out of particular periods and places. This is, you know, building on, well, as I was thinking about, whether it's a genealogy of the secular, what does it actually look like as a force that is not necessarily, that is sometimes something that goes beyond the political and going back to, and I don't think we've discussed this or mentioned this, but thinking about the kind of classic secularization thesis or paradigm characterized by, you know, the idea of decline, differentiation and privatization.
And, and, and, by that is decline, you know, decline in adherence and in prominence, differentiation, thinking about secularism in terms of separation of church and state, and privatization, thinking about religion and religion related things as being relegated to the private sphere. And this is something that, that, the people that there is a kind of pushback answer, that was the things we're not playing out exactly in those anticipated ways and using Casanova's phrasing that, you know, that we were witnessing potentially a deprivitization moment. And I think scholarship has taken that and has moved, has moved beyond that and built on it to think about what it actually means to, you know, think about how we inhabit the secular, but also how, you know, secularity is, is part of us. And what does that mean for those of us living in working and existing in liberal democratic contexts?
And I recognize that these are massive, contested, capacious terms. And I do acknowledge that in book that, you know, trying not to complete liberalism with secularism, these are their own conversations with their own histories and genealogy as well. I do point that out without dwelling on it in the book, but thinking about what that means in terms of thinking about liberal subject formation. Right.
And just to mention Casanova, you referred to Jose Casanova, the sociologist. That's right. Yes, that is another famous Casanova. Okay.
Sorry, not that one. Not that one. Okay. That's fine.
We're almost out of time. So very, very briefly, I'm curious if you have any concrete suggestions for how to improve religious literacy instruction. It's interesting that you asked me that. And that was something that was front of mind for me because so much of the conversation around religious literacy is how do you do more of it and how do you do it better?
And that was one of the assumptions or presuppositions around the goal of scholarship that I was trying to sort of unpick. But at the same time, of course, you know, you need to think about what you would recommend and how that works. I was certainly attuned to that while going forward. So what I would say is big picture, you know, what I would recommend, the takeaways that I hope that readers would get from this book and from this conversation is really just that I hope that they would come away with basically a fresh perspective on the often unnamed moods, environments, feelings, attachments that underpin our liberal democratic context.
And more than that, I think through the test case of religious literacy, I hope that the book that it gestures towards and provides pathways to what can be done within this changing terrain of applied religious studies and public scholarship. So I think it touches on these and I'll get to some of the recommendations, but I think it touches on these wider themes throughout that, you know, despite this emphasis on rationality, individual discernment and deliberative democracy that runs through this promotion, there's often an onack knowledge move to reconfigure our affective, our felt environments and conditions in the service of greater inclusivity and democratic sociability. So I'd say step one as a recommendation, let's talk about it, let's name that. If it's, you know, if we're going to meet the needs of the present, I think my biggest recommendation is one, and I hope the book would help spark this conversation is that we start rethinking and reconsidering and revising religious literacy to meet kind of the present moment.
And I think the big take home, if we remembered nothing else from this conversation and that my hope would be that somebody reading this book or listening in would be able to think about and continue to consider the need to focus on bodies not simply on minds, but this is a whole, and then I think it's time that we, you know, take a step into considering this wider and more holistic picture. I also, I will add that I think that there are going to be many area, and also how do we do this in ways that don't critically reinforce uncritical religion, secular binaries? How do we take very seriously a critical religion critique that that calls us to attend to kind of the power formations of the category of religion itself can sometimes assume and put forward? And the final thing I would say on this point is that I really do think, especially in this present moment around thinking about threats to liberal democracy and other, you know, potential threats to democratic order that is getting a lot of prominence right now is that I think that there are going to be many areas for further research into embodied pedagogy.
And what I mean by that is, you know, what it means to be a liberal subject during these times of threat. So attuning ourselves to the affects, emotions, role of bodies and environment within our civic spaces, I'm absolutely convinced that these will be sites for further research, and I think perhaps more importantly, urgent action as well. So those are those are my big hopes and I think recommendations as well. Terrific.
Well, thank you so much for that. And thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us today. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here and I appreciate our conversation.
Thank you for hosting me. That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great day.