RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SPACE

A podcast with Dr. Alexander Smith, Department of Sociology

Whether it’s a debate around stem cell research, abortion or Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, we are living through a moment when it appears that religion is once more in the ascendance in the public sphere. But are we seeing a genuine resurgence of interest in religion, or have these debates simply come to the attention of the media and policymakers in recent years? Dr. Smith examines the issues in this podcast with Kelly Parkes-Harrison.

Dr Alexander Smith from the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick has recently started a research project called Science, Religion and the Making of Publics in the UK and the US which intends to gain insight into where these debates are taking us in the future. The project is part of a large Leverhulme Research programme which is being led by the Institute of Science and Society at the University of Nottingham. The programme, Making Science Public: Challenges and Opportunities, will run for five years.

“The conventional wisdom,” Dr Smith explains, “would suggest that religion is playing a greater role in public debates and politics today than it was. My suspicion, though, is that religious voices have been engaging with these debates for a long time, and it’s really academics and policymakers who are waking up to the fact that those voices have been there.”

Some Catholics, he reminds us, broke away from the Blair government in 2008 over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, and this was a good example of academics, policymakers and the media taking note of religious leaders entering Parliamentary debate, rather than these voices being raised for the first time. But does Dr Smith think that the frequency and prominence of these debates indicate that we are in fact moving away from a more secular society?

“I think what we’re moving away from is an understanding of secularism, based on the secularisation thesis that was very popular in Sociology in the mid-20th-century which basically predicted that as the world modernises and as modern technologies become used by a greater number of people in societies around the world, people will lose their attachments to faith traditions and religion,” says Dr Smith.

“I think that’s been proved not to be the case. I think the secularisation thesis has been rebutted largely because of the rise of conservative religion in the US in the late 20th century, though there are figures on the Christian right that have no problem with modern technologies and modern sciences… often these types of technologies become tools for re-mobilising and re-organising and then mobilising those in politics – so there is a relationship between religion and science there nonetheless. But I think what’s been called into question is the kind of complacent ideas that many have about what secularism is. Secularism is not a hostility to religion, it is about creating a public space where religious voices do not dominate.”

It’s important to defend the space where religious and non-religious voices can have a debate, rather than to have one group holding all the ground, adds Dr Smith. The University of Nottingham’s programme is interested in the interface between science and politics and particularly in debates around suggestions of a loss of public trust in science and a sense that public science can no longer find the grounds for legitimacy for political decisions.

“My project is a four-year project as part of that programme and I’m particularly interested in three debates that would appear to throw science and religion into collision with each other; one is abortion politics, the other is embryonic stem cell research, and the final issue is creationism or debates about evolution… The purpose of my research is to really explore those debates ethnographically – I have an active field site in the American Midwest, in Kansas City, which is a primary battlefield in these debates.”

For more information about Dr Alexander’s Smith research, listen to the podcast above.

Dr Alexander Smith is a Senior Leverhulme Research Fellow in Sociology at Warwick University as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kansas University. He also holds an Honorary Lectureship in the Institute of Science and Society at Nottingham University.

Born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia, Dr Smith has been awarded a Garrison Keillor Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for North American Studies in the British Library and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Birmingham, Edinburgh and Keele Universities in the UK.

He has just returned from month-long fieldwork on the Republican Party primary taking place today in Johnson County, Kansas, which forms part of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. His fieldwork forms part of Leverhulme Trust-funded research on religion and science debates in both the UK and the USA.

By Dr Annette Rubery