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5
Religion, Spiritua
Religion, Spirituality and Secularism
rina arya

This chapter responds to a range of contemporary debates in the field of

religion, spirituality and secularism in books published between 2011 and

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2012, it is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Secularism; 3.
Religion, Media and Culture; 4. Religion and Popular Culture; 5. Religion
and the Visual Arts. Many of the books discussed here are edited volumes of
papers that resulted from funded workshops or conferences. Research in
religion can be split into different areas that include the study of religious
traditions in themselves, which overlaps with theological concerns, and the
sociological and ‘lived’ study of religions that examines the role of religion
and spirituality in life and cultural practices. This chapter examines the latter
strand, where the concepts of religion, the spiritual and the secular, all of
which are ‘multidimensional phenomena’ (Norris and Inglehart [2011]
p. 40), are brought into question.

1. Introduction
Since the end of the twentieth century, religion, in its various forms, has
been influenced by the use of mass media and technology, and this has
resulted in new formulations of religiosity and, alongside these, newer
vocabularies, including neologisms. Questions about methodology arise con-
cerning how to study these new forms of religion and their relationships with
the technologies that give them expression. The boundaries that separate the
religious from the secular and the sacred from the profane become increas-
ingly blurred as religion and the notion of the religious becomes explored
and articulated through ‘profane’ channels of communication, including
advertising and other forms of media. The ubiquity of media and technology,
however, needs to be taken seriously in current and future approaches to the
study of religion. There is no mistaking that religions throughout the world

The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 22 ß The English Association (2014)
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84 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

have been transformed by global processes. The rapid development from old
to new media has resulted in a proliferation of forms of digital and mobile
technologies that have altered communication in innumerable ways and
which have had a significant impact on society as a whole. These media
forms have led to a greater range of spiritual expressions that is seen now
not only in the printed image but also in film and internet technologies. The
expansion of media provides a greater diversity of choices for consumers of
religion. Particularly in post-industrial societies we are looking at a pick and
mix approach—what is also known as ‘bricolage’—to spiritual affiliations
that may or may not be related to established religions.

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In ‘The Changing Faces of Media and Religion’ in Religion and Change in
Modern Britain (Routledge [2012]), Kim Knott and Jolyon Mitchell give
an overview of the transformations that have occurred in the forms of
religion as a result of the advancement of communication technologies.
Their study was conducted in Britain but many of the findings are applic-
able internationally. Focusing particularly on the effects that these media
have had on users and audiences, they comment on the ease with
which one is able to immerse oneself in qualitatively different spiritual
experiences:
What is new is for audiences to be able to navigate effortlessly from
newspaper article via humanist blog to television clips of a papal Mass
in Glasgow. There are endless other possibilities online, which allow
a Londoner to travel in a few moments from the homepage of a
rapidly growing Pentecostal church in Latin America via a virtual
tour of a shattered Buddha statue in Afghanistan to photographs of a
development project funded by Muslim Aid in Pakistan. Distraught
faces following the attacks on a Coptic church in Cairo, a Catholic
church in Baghdad or a Shi’ite mosque in Fallujah are only a few
clicks away. (p. 260)
The juxtapositions of experiences that can happen not only successively but
also simultaneously, highlights the range of and exposure to religious and
ethical practices that give meaning to many people’s lives. In discussing
choice Knott and Mitchell (p. 245) draw on the discussion of the ‘subjective
turn’—described by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead in Spiritual Revolution:
Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (Blackwell [2005])—to indicate the
variety of ways in which individuals can construct and reflect on their reli-
gious and spiritual identities in relation to different media such as television
or films. An episode of a soap opera may be able to resonate more strongly
than something more formal, such as a religious text. The initiator of
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 85

spiritual thinking, that is, the source of reflection needs to be taken seriously.
This leads to what I described earlier as a blurring of boundaries between the
different realms of activities and behaviour—the religious and the secular,
and the sacred and profane. The variety of outlets that can give rise to
spiritual reflection is also conveyed by the plurality of religious (and often
individualized) expressions that are seen apart from societal institutionaliza-
tion (but not necessarily community).

2. Secularism

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Rethinking Secularism is a multi-authored comparative study that interrogates
‘the current state of play’ in the field (p. 20). Bridging gaps between the
social sciences and the humanities, the editors bring together scholars from
different disciplinary areas, including the sociology of religion, political
theory and anthropology, in a project funded by the Social Science
Research Council, with the aim of giving a diverse account of secularism
in the contemporary world. The book’s introduction problematizes the term
‘secularism’ which it argues should not be conceptualized as ‘a universal
constant’ (p. 17)—as there are many different interpretations, hence mul-
tiple secularisms. ‘[S]ecularism takes different shapes in relation to different
religions and different political and cultural milieus’ (p. 17) and is itself an
unstable concept, which in relation to the religious should not be seen ‘as
fixed and stable but, rather, as shifting, evolving, and elusive’ (p. 25). In
keeping with this, another objective of the book is to develop understanding
about secularism and its significance in different spheres of society in the
global world. There has been a tendency, it has been argued, to view secu-
larism as ideologically neutral, as the remainder when religion has been
removed, what Charles Taylor describes as ‘subtraction stories’ (p. 11).
Although frequently twinned with religion, according to the book’s editors,
secularism should be seen as having a presence in its own right as an active
principle that shapes public life:
It is something, and it is therefore in need of elaboration and under-
standing. Whether it is seen as an ideology, a worldview, a stance
toward religion, a constitutional framework, or simply an aspect of
some other project—of science or a particular philosophical system.
(p. 5)
Neither, the book argues, should secularism necessarily be viewed in terms
of a dichotomy or in a binary relation with religion. Increasing religiousness
does not always indicate the dwindling of secularism. State secularism in
86 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

countries such as the United States and India generates ‘a framework for
religious pluralism’ (p. 16) and a climate of tolerance. In other countries like
France, secularism (laı̈cité) that emerged from a history of anti-clericalism is
integral to public and national identity.
Another issue that the contributors are alive to is the fact that although
the models of secularism, as presented in the form of the relationship be-
tween the separation of state and religion have not changed, society certainly
has, which has created tension. This is seen in the cases of France and
the US, which Alfred Stepan discusses in his separatist model (p. 117).
Stepan refers to the religious and ethnic demands of France’s second-

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and third-generation Muslim citizens to illustrate the current tensions
that exist for these people in a culture that restricts the expressions of
their groups. The recent ban on pupils wearing headscarves in schools is
one such example (p. 118). Turning to his next case study, the US, Stepan
argues that:
because of its great toleration of almost all activities of religious
groups, [the US] finds it politically and to some extent even consti-
tutionally difficult to control some of the demands of rapidly growing
and politically assertive fundamentalist religious groups from virtu-
ally all religions. (pp. 118–19)
The book pays tribute to the pioneering research by Charles Taylor in his A
Secular Age (Harvard UP [2007]), especially his consideration of the political,
sociological and cultural strands as distinctive strands of secularism. The
importance of Taylor’s work is attested to by the extent to which his
work is cited in the contributions and significantly a resume of his ideas is
presented as the first chapter, ‘Western Secularity’. But while marking
his work, there is also a strong inclination to move the discussion beyond
the collectively titled ‘North Atlantic societies’ (comprising Western Europe
and North America) to look at the global context. At least five of the essays
explicitly concentrate on the non-Western world. This refocus from
the Western framework makes the book an invaluable resource in studying
the global perspective of secularism. In Chapter Four Rajeev Bhargava de-
bunks the Western model of secularism that divides the social world into the
‘Western modern’ and the ‘traditional non-Western’ and, using the example
of India, shows how a country can be both modern and secular, in terms of
its constitutional framework. Furthermore, we learn that secularism should
not be crudely viewed as a categorical resistance against religion but rather
against religious homogenization or institutionalized religious domination
(p. 92). Secularism, in India and elsewhere, is not incompatible with
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 87

religious pluralism and emerges as a form of state neutrality. In Chapter Five

Alfred Stepan challenges the commonly made assertion that Muslims are
resistant to secularism. But even in some other multicultural societies where
Islam coexists alongside other religions, Islamic law underpins socio-political
order and this has led to mounting tensions between Islamists and non-
Islamists, as marked by the volatility surrounding debates of democracy.
At the other end of the scale is the separation between Islam and the
State as in the position of the secular Turks under Atatürk in the 1920s,
followed by various Middle Eastern and Asian states, such as Egypt under
Nasser, Syria under Assad, and Afghanistan under Taraki. Stepan reveals that

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Islam and secularism are not mutually exclusive and there are cases, namely
Indonesia, Senegal and India, where processes of secularity do not disrupt
the Islamic character (p. 125).
In Chapter Eleven Richard Madsen discusses the lasting impact that an-
cient religious traditions have on the collective identity of people. While not
professing to personal religious beliefs, the ‘secular façade of Asian political
institutions’ such as China, Indonesia and Taiwan in the aftermath of the Cold
War ‘masked an ‘‘interior spirit’’ of religiosity’ (p. 27). Applying Taylor’s
tripartite analysis to the said East and Southeast Asian countries, Madsen
argues that while their governments are based on secular constitutions that
conform to western models of secularity, their societies and cultures practice
rituals such as ancestry worship that are unmistakably religious. This leads to
the construction of an external face of secularity that is different in character
from the inner need to engage with the religious (pp. 250–1). A similar idea
is echoed by Peter van der Veer in Chapter Twelve where he argues for the
compatibility of a rationalized (in the sense of secular) outlook and ‘a wide-
spread interest in religious practices, in visiting shrines during tourist trips,
in religious forms of healing’ (p. 275). While no consensus about secularism
is reached in the volume, the diverse and thorough approaches taken do
much to deepen the research, to clarify the central debates and to address
current issues.
Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide by Pippa Norris and
Ronald Inglehart (CUP [2011]) takes a more holistic perspective to secular-
ism. Rather than delineating the different strands of secularism, the emphasis
is on the wholesale tenets of what they describe as the ‘secularization thesis’
regarding the diminishment of religion. Since the nineteenth century there
have been a number of accounts by different thinkers, such as Auguste
Comte, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx about the growth of
secularism and its processes including industrialization and modernization
being concomitant with the decline and eventual disappearance of religion.
88 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

This is the premise laid out in the preface. The widespread belief in the
processes of modernity promulgated secularist thinking. But, contrary to
these predictions, religion has not disappeared throughout the world; in
fact ‘[t]he world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious
views than ever before—and they constitute a growing proportion of the
world’s population’ (p. 5). Secularism has occurred, among other areas, in
parts of the Western post-industrial world where we can talk about the
decline in institutionalized religious practices, but it is not a blanket condi-
tion that obtains throughout the world. The authors address this situation by
examining why secularism is evidenced in some parts of the world while

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other parts are experiencing religious resurgence. To explain the disparity
they develop a ‘theory of existential security’. The authors consider the
underpinning factors that may have influenced religiosity, in particular the
level of existential security, which can pertain to economic and physical
security. They ask a fundamental question: why is religious belief so critical
and vital in some areas of the world and not in others? One way of respond-
ing to this is to think about the extent of need. By redirecting the issue onto
the anthropological, sociological and psychological, they think about the
function and purpose of religion pertaining to what it can provide in
human life. Religion gives purpose: it provides an existential framework
of reflection, the security of a higher power, and it gives hope to vulnerable
populations. Religion, like secularism, nurtures certain ontological needs,
and for many people across the world these needs are met by belief in a
transcendent order. Their hypothesis is that people in certain parts of the
world are more receptive to the perceived effects of religious belief. They
state:
We believe that the importance of religiosity persists most strongly
among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer na-
tions, facing personal survival-threatening risks. We argue that feel-
ings of vulnerability to physical, societal, and personal risks are a key
factor driving religiosity and we demonstrate that the process of
secularization [. . .] has occurred most clearly among the most
prosperous social sectors living in affluent and secure post-industrial
nations. (pp. 4–5)
They test their theory of existential security against evidence from the World
Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Survey (EVS) from
1981–2001 ‘which have carried out representative national surveys in
eighty societies around the globe, covering all the world’s major faiths’
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 89

(p. xiii). The survey explores people’s values, beliefs and actions by asking a
range of questions and provides:
data from countries containing more than 85% of the world’s
population and covering the full range of variation, from societies
with per capita incomes as low as $300 per year to societies with
per capita incomes one hundred times that high; and from long-
established democracies with market economies to authoritarian
states and ex-socialist states. (p. xiv)
They also examined evidence from other sources including Gallup

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International polls, the International Social Survey Program, and
Eurobarometer surveys. These data sets were examined in conjunction
with longitudinal evidence of historic trends to chart the changes in religious
attitudes over a period of time. They assimilated their findings in case studies
that have a global focus. Chapter Four considers the United States and
Western Europe; Chapter Five shifts the focus on to Central and Eastern
Europe and Chapter Six examines the situation of Islamic societies in the
Middle East, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria and Pakistan. While it is useful to have
the case studies grouped together in one section of the book, it would have
been beneficial to have a more extensive discussion and nuanced understand-
ing, especially in Chapter Six, about the different Islamic states in question.
The authors’ findings are largely consistent with their hypothesis but
there are some disparities that they explore in Chapter Four. These are
about the resurgence of religiosity and growth of churches across post-in-
dustrial nations including the US and post-communist countries such as
Poland. This pattern is explained with recourse to a context-specific analysis;
it is significant that in more socially and economically deprived states that are
populated by certain ethnic groups, like Hispanics or African-Americans,
religious belief is on the rise, a fact that is often conveyed by the growth of
churches.
What emerges in the research are the complex ways in which religion
can be measured (see pp. 13–21). For this purpose certain indicators were
adopted from the WVS/EVS, which include religious participation, religious
values and religious belief, to determine affiliation. Some of these variables
cross-cut one another. To use an example from the study, ‘although only 5%
of the Swedish public attends church weekly, the Swedish public as a whole
manifests a distinctive Protestant value system’ (p. 17), which makes the
situation less clear-cut. It cannot be assumed that non-attendance of religious
institutions is equivalent to unbelief or of lack of interest in religion,
and more needs to be said about how the indicators can better be
90 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

reconfigured to make this distinction. In poorer parts of the world religious

values are supported by beliefs and participation, while in large sections of
the Western world religious values have been inherited from older
generations.
The authors conclude that while the seeds of secularism were sown in
the modern world, it is erroneous to talk of secularism as being a world-
dominating trend. Major religious faiths have experienced revitalization,
something which strongly suggests that religion is not a universally declining
force. The growth of fundamentalism is further evidence that religion is not
lessening in importance on a world-scale and is indicative of the passion that

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religion is able to generate in people’s lives. In cases where secularism is a
growing force, which is the case in highly industrialized societies, it still has
to compete with the entanglement of religion in the formulations of politics
and other values. Observations show both an increase and decrease of re-
ligiosity across the globe which suggests that there are diverse patterns of
religiosity that includes different trends across generations, for example, and
variation across places as well.
The book’s coverage of religiosity in such a wide range of countries,
including lesser-explored regions such as Australia and Japan, singles it out as
a landmark study in terms of its geographical range, and explains its con-
tinued relevance to scholarship in the field. It should be added that this book
is the second edition of a study that was originally published in 2004. The
authors make it clear that the 2011 edition extends the discussion further,
claiming that ‘the evidence available when the first edition [. . .] was pub-
lished was insufficient to address some important conceptual and empirical
issues’ (p. 244). I am not sure that the addition of further concluding
chapters really adds anything to the thesis. The authors revisit one of the
central criticisms leveled at the book that the evidence given ‘did not
establish a direct individual-level link between religiosity and measures of
existential security’ (p. 254). One of the issues that the authors wanted to
respond to in Chapter Eleven was alternative spiritualities that do not fall
under the umbrella of institutionalized religions. Since the end of the twen-
tieth century there has been an interest in the growth of forms of what are
known in popular culture as ‘new spiritual outlets’ (NSOs) which may take
various forms including ‘New Religious Movements’ (NRMs), ‘Alternative
Spiritualities’ or New Age religions, all of which are marked by their sep-
aration from institutionalized and mainstream religion. These sporadic and
often marginalized practices may not be religious in a formalized and insti-
tutionalized sense but they are certainly not secular. These non-transcendent
forms of religion have not been accounted for in the WVS and EVS and, for
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 91

the purposes of the authors’ study, may have been significant in relation to
feelings of existential security, a point by the raised by the authors as an area
for future research (pp. 250–1).

3. Religion, Media and Culture

As a subject area, religion, media and culture has grown in the last twenty
years, facilitated by landmark works such as Gordon Lynch’s Understanding
Theology and Popular Culture (Wiley-Blackwell [2004]) and Stewart Hoover’s
Religion in the Media Age (Routledge [2006]) that have surveyed the territory

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and put down important markers for future research. Thinking about the
religious dimensions of culture is a natural development of cultural studies.
The addition of religion to cultural studies and other related areas, like
media studies, involved a shift towards looking at the religious aspects of
culture, and, conversely, looking at how culture can be used to comment on
and develop religion. Since the 1990s there has been what Gordon Lynch,
Jolyon Mitchell and Anna Strhan have described as an ‘exponential growth in
academic literature in religion, media and culture’ (p. 1). In their Reader,
Religion, Media and Culture (Routledge [2011]) that was catalyzed by a series
of UK-based seminars on ‘Religion, the Sacred and the Changing Cultures of
Everyday Life’, they aimed to survey the field to examine the different
strands of research that shape discussion about the relationship between
religion and the following diverse fields: film, the internet, visual culture,
consumer culture that are current within ‘media-saturated, late capitalist
societies’ (p. 2). Valuable research has been done in each of these areas but
what remains untapped is how these different groups fit together; what are
their overarching concerns? The Reader aims to consolidate the different
strands of research. It is divided into four parts, each examining a central
issue. These are, in order, the relationship between religion, spirituality and
consumer culture; how ‘the expansion of different forms of media, in terms
of both their type and their reach into social life, shapes the conditions
through which religion is encountered and performed in the modern
world’; ‘the role of embodiment and the senses in the practice of reli-
gious life’; and ‘the normative critique of cultural products and practices’
(pp. 3–5).
The consumerist and materialist objectives of popular media have led to a
marketplace mentality where, crudely speaking, religion has become com-
modified and marketed as the project of self-improvement through thera-
peutic cultures. Part One of the Reader explores the parallels between
spiritual goals in different religious traditions and economic markets in
92 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

various ways. In Chapter Three Nabil Echchaibi discusses how ‘[t]he pres-
ence of Muslim commodities in the marketplace is not new. Muslims have
always shopped for such items as prayer mats, clothing, rosaries, religious
self-help books, audiocassettes, and pamphlets’ (p. 32). What is different
now is ‘a marked change in the scale and nature of products available’
(p. 32). This important distinction can be applied more generally to other
religions, which are being explored in the chapters of this Reader in terms of
the wants they can satisfy and desires they can fulfill. ‘[D]ifferent kinds of
economic and cultural consumption play an integral role in the development
and persistence of various kinds of religious and spiritual activity in contem-

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porary society’ (p. 7). In Chapter One Marion Bowman explains what it
means to ‘spiritually [shop] around’ with reference to Glastonbury, which is
‘examined as an example of a specialized site of religious and spiritual con-
sumption where [. . .] commercial transactions can have sacralized meanings
and value’ (p. 11).
In their introduction to the Reader the editors state how the multiple
forms of technology, especially of the digital kind that characterizes contem-
porary society, ‘provide the conditions and resources through which people
encounter and practice different forms of religious and spiritual life’ (p. 3).
The accessibility of information available through digital technology has
enabled a greater transmission of ideas about different belief systems and
practices, allowing people a greater degree of choice about religions that is
not limited by demography. Furthermore, technology has created virtual
communities that bring people together in ways that are not hindered by
the obstacles of spatial and temporal distances. These virtual communities
help to sustain collective identity and often lead to real encounters during
physical gatherings.
In addition to the impact that the internet has had on the spread of
religion, an increasing amount of research has explored the potential of
digital media as a way of reconfiguring spirituality. Part Two of the
Reader explores ‘the expansion of different forms of media’ (p. 4) and
discusses the complexity of the media devices and the way they interrelate,
thereby affecting the ways in which religion is experienced. The Reader also
explores how religious behaviours (in the sense of beliefs and practices) can
be found in non- or extra-religious activities, thereby expanding the param-
eters of what we understand as religious forms. This has been the case in
popular music cultures where it has been observed that they assume many of
the functions met by conventional religions and have come to constitute what
are known as ‘New Religious Movements’. It is worth adding that although
the avenues and channels have multiplied and have diversified from
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 93

traditional routes, they have in common certain features with religions,

including the prescription of a code of ethics or ritualistic practices for its
believers to uphold, certain beliefs that underpin the code, the fulfillment of
purpose and a sense of belonging. They transport the believer from a state of
the profane to that of the transcendent. In this transportation the individual
feels connected to something that is greater than him/herself and merges
with the collective group mentality, thereby conveying the power of social
practice. These feelings are often described with recourse to Émile
Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, which refers to a collective
sensibility that is generated through ritual and is the origin of religious

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feelings and behaviour. In Chapter Twenty-Two of the Reader, Gordon
Lynch considers the ‘broader project of thinking about sources of meaning
and value in contemporary culture through a renewed focus on the concept
of the sacred’, which he examines in relation to Durkheim’s understanding as
the collective understanding of social forces, as mediated in his landmark
work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) (pp. 244–7).
In her introduction to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (The Free
Press 1995 [1912]) Karen E. Fields summarizes the process of transform-
ation that occurs: Durkheim
found the birth of that idea in rites, at moments of collective
effervescence, when human beings feel themselves transformed, and
are in fact transformed, through ritual doing. A force experienced
as external to each individual is the agent of that transformation,
but the force itself is created by the fact of assembling and
temporarily living a collective life that transports individuals
beyond themselves. (p. xli)
These forms are also apparent in experiences outside religious rituals includ-
ing music festivals or sporting events. This does not mean, however, that the
aforesaid are religions but that they can generate religious feelings and thus
are fertile ground for scholars of religion. Those who have been caught up in
experiencing the feelings and behaviours that may be described as religious
do not necessarily agree that what they are experiencing is religious.
A common practice when thinking about the religious aspects of media
and culture has been to apply Durkheim’s study of the sacred and the profane
to modern life. This pioneering approach, used by Gordon Lynch, among
others, problematizes the secularist debate because it is committed to the
idea of the expression of the sacred that stands outside of the institutions of
religion. In the Western world in particular, the decline in interest in formal
religion is not matched by a decline in interest in sacred experiences but
94 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

instead a proliferation of new directions of spirituality, which raises the

question of how pertinent secularism is.

4. Religion and Popular Culture

Media and popular culture have had a profound influence on the way we
experience religion and also on the study of religion. As mentioned earlier
with reference to Heelas and Woodhead’s notion of ‘the subjective turn’, we
are increasingly turning to forms of media such as television and film to
formulate our religious and spiritual identities, and equally these media are

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being examined for their theological import. In Virtual Orientalism: Asian
Religions and American Popular Culture (OUP [2011]) Jane Naomi Iwamura
discusses the significance that television and other forms of popular media
have had as modes of sharing belief systems across a cultural divide. She
discusses the increase in awareness in the United States from the 1950s
onwards of what she terms ‘Asian religions’, namely Buddhism, Hinduism
and other religions that originated in parts of Asia. Without the media,
knowledge of non-Western religions would have been more difficult to ac-
quire, and thus it became an important carrier of information that opened up
channels between Western audiences and Eastern religions and cultures. This
led to a wider understanding, acceptance and even conversion of American
adherents who had been hitherto unfamiliar with these traditions.
Iwamura uses three case studies of archetypal ‘Oriental Monk’ figures
that were featured in television, film and popular magazines from the mid-
twentieth century onwards and traces their genealogies. These figures ori-
ginate from different spiritual traditions. The first is the Japanese scholar
D.T. Suzuki, who popularized Zen Buddhism; then we have the Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, who was the one-time spiritual guru of the Beatles and other
celebrities such as Mia Farrow; and finally, Kwai Chang Caine, the pacifist
protagonist in the American Broadcasting Company television series of the
1970s, Kung Fu, who helped bring martial arts to a Western audience. In all
these cases Iwamura stresses the importance of the image as an anchor point
for Western audiences. This is noteworthy; it was not the teachings or
philosophies of these ‘gurus’ that focused the attention of mainstream
American audiences but their media representations which were featured
on television and in newspapers. Popular media celebrated the power of the
image that transcended verbal language. Her study offers ‘close readings of
the images’ as she traces their coverage in media representations (p. 5).
Iwamura’s selection of figures gives an insight into the American
psyche—these were all individuals that could provide respite from
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 95

Western materialism. D.T. Suzuki’s teachings were already known in elitist

circles but in the late 1950s it was the Beatniks who popularized them. The
Maharishi was ‘the first spiritual leader from the East to experience popular
media attention’ (p. 108). Kwai Chang Caine was different because unlike
the former two examples, he was a fictional character, and was one of the
first lead characters on US television of Asian origin. Not only did he help
introduce the ancient Chinese martial art of Kung Fu into the American
public domain but his character being of Chinese descent brought a visible
minority group into mainstream television, which was revolutionary in its
day. However, as Iwamura notes, the character was actually played by a white

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actor, a fact that may undermine the previous claim (p. 137).
One of the most interesting findings of the research was that although
technology was the conduit through which the ‘Oriental Monk’ figure gained
exposure, in order to retain its credibility and authenticity, the monk had to
be seen to be at odds with the Western world, especially its technological
progress, and was to be seen in search of non-materialist and transcendent
ideals. What was on offer in each case—Zen, enlightenment, the spiritual
practice of the martial arts—represented spiritual alternatives to those who
were disillusioned with their current lives and who felt spiritually impover-
ished. Previously unknown pilgrimages, such as Rishikesh in India, became
sites of tourist interest because of the Beatles’ pursuits. The emergence of
this phenomenon, known as ‘seeker spirituality’ and documented by soci-
ologists of religion Wade Clark Roof and Robert Wuthnow, referred to the
practice of looking at alternatives to Christianity (p. 20). These alternatives
offered possibilities that were not always available in Western thought. Zen
was one example that enabled its adherents to explore non-Western para-
digms of thought and to thereby embrace contradiction and intuition in novel
ways. The media whet the public’s appetite for spirituality and encouraged
people to go in search of meaning in new encounters. In their quest to seek
out their spiritual ideal, consumers sought experiences that were of a dif-
ferent order to the materialism they were used to. This included finding
figures who served as spiritual role models and guides. The Beatles were
attracted to the serenity of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who offered them
sanctuary from the manic pace of celebrity lives. What is interesting is that
the Yogi was not beyond public scrutiny. Although initially revered because
of the Beatles’ adulation of him, and his association with the Transcendental
Meditation movement, the Yogi’s credentials began to be questioned by
reporters who were skeptical about his motives for public attention. They
were suspicious about his alleged over familiarity with Western technologies
(in the New York Times he was photographed using a telephone) and for his
96 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

interest in his new-found status as a celebrity. Iwamura reproduces numer-

ous press cuttings of the Yogi to document her narrative (see pp. 66–107).
The expectations placed on the Yogi were excessive—he was idealized in the
public imagination and people did not want to see a fallen figure who
behaved like anyone else. In order to retain his appeal he had to be resolutely
‘authentic’, which meant being unfamiliar with the Western ways of life,
thus preserving the mystique of the East and moreover, these credentials
were validated by the Westerner alone, in her quest for enlightenment.
The icon of the Oriental Monk, in his various guises, stirred interest in
the American imagination and could be seen as opening up a multiculturalist

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exchange. But he could equally be seen negatively as a stereotype of racia-
lization. In Iwamura’s study the West is equated with technological and
economic progress while the East is painted as being more concerned
with the spiritual aspects of being. And although radically heterogeneous
the three subjects of her case studies were conflated into the stock figure
of the Oriental Monk, a contemplative otherworldly figure, in eastern dress,
who was a font of metaphysical wisdom. This amalgam oversimplified the
practices of the three individuals. Iwamura uses Edward Said’s concept of
Orientalism to draw attention to the gulf between the actual reality of the
figure and their reductive representation, where it was the latter that spoke
to the American public (see pp. 7, 104). Iwamura discusses how the monk
figure also had the effect of eliding differences between representations,
thereby de-emphasizing the stark cultural differences between each paradig-
matic figure: ‘In each of these examples, the characters may change, but they
play the same role, serve the same function, and tell the same story—time
and time again’ (p. 161). Furthermore the fixation on the image (the surface)
as the point of identification rather than the message discouraged any depth
of analysis and the need to interrogate the real lived-out experiences of these
figures. Iwamura discusses the consequences of the glorification of the image
through ‘mass-mediated representations’ which she argues have ‘significant
social effects’. What happens is ‘the condition of the hyperreal, where images
[in Baudrillardian terms] becomes ‘‘more real than the real’’’ (p. 8).
Continuing in the tradition of looking at the popularity of TV and media
representations, Pete Ward, in Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion and
Celebrity Culture (Baylor UP [2011]), discusses the growing religiosity of
celebrity culture, where celebrities are elevated to the status of pseudo-
Gods. Ward describes celebrity culture as being a form of para-religion,
where it has shared characteristics with religion (pp. 57, 129) and, similarly,
celebrities arouse or awaken passions that may be described as ‘religious’
in would-be followers who experience what Gary Laderman (in Sacred
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 97

Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of
Religious Life in the United States [New Press (2009)]), calls ‘spiritual meaning,
personal fulfillment, and awe-inspiring motivation in the presence of these
idols’ (quoted in Ward [2011] p. 4). For many, this is undesirable because it
is about the glorification of an image-led society that fetishizes empty signs.
It is interesting how the term ‘icon’—which was traditionally used to
refer to sacred images—has now been appropriated in popular culture to
refer to celebrities that enjoy global success and who are widely known, if
only because of their image. Through the screenprints of Andy Warhol, for
example, icons have in the digital age been transformed into global hyper-

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brands that have more power and wealth than ever before. Speaking of
Marilyn Monroe, Ward argues that ‘[h]er movies are continually playing
on a digital channel somewhere. Retouched and restored, her image con-
tinues to move and has life on DVD and Blu-ray’ (p. 90). Ward discusses the
focus on ‘the body beautiful’ and the control that celebrities exert over their
self-image. His book also gives a general overview of the ‘sacred’ status that
celebrities hold in public life. In addition to the industry celebrities are
known for, they often have ambassadorial roles for charity, can influence
politics and are used to endorse products. Social media tools like Twitter
enable celebrities to inform their fans of their lofty or more prosaic pursuits,
and the availability of these tools mean that people can have almost constant
access to their stars. The ability to be able to plug into their lives through
websites and celebrity columns that increasingly are given more coverage,
and learn about their latest ventures, reduces the distance between these
‘superhuman’ figures and their fans.
Celebrity culture mutually reinforces fandom culture, which gives fans
the opportunity to share their devotion about their celebrity with other
similarly minded fans and to create communities where their group identi-
fication can be shared and worship of the figure in question can be practiced
in a number of ways. Important events in the celebrity’s lives are shared with
their fans and their eventual death is marked by highly ceremonial activities
that often continue for long after, with remembrance services or pilgrimages
to chosen sites being ways in which fans continue to channel their adoration.
The outpouring of emotion at the deaths of figures such as Elvis Presley
(pp. 30–2) and Princess Diana (pp. 14–17) reflected the heightened emo-
tions that many have towards their idols and the lengths they go to in order
to show devotion. Media adulation creates the commodification of these
figures in various ways—their image is reproduced on clothing, posters
and they are used to endorse products and lifestyles. But in spite of increased
exposure, their superhuman and hyperreal personas put them beyond reach,
98 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

which sets up the cycle of desire and satisfaction that is exercised in con-
sumption. This raises the question Ward poses: ‘What kinds of Gods?’ are
we looking at here (p. 87). In his final chapter he picks out theological
terms—‘sin’, ‘revelation’, ‘redemption’—to construct a para-theological
narrative of the ‘rise and fall’ of these quasi-divine figures.
So far in this section we have seen a number of examples of studies that
have looked at how media and technology have altered the religious land-
scape in various ways. All the examples presented were from the West. In
Virtual Orientalism it especially became apparent that Asian cultures were
defined in opposition to the perceived Western values of media and tech-

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nology. Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia (Routledge [2011])
examines the issue from an Islamic perspective by looking at the production
of ‘popular Islam’ (p. 1) which consists of popular and consumerist expres-
sions of Islam in images, texts, songs and narratives that are means for
Muslim youth to share and practice their faith in the modern world. The
book’s importance is reflected in its scope. The prominence of Middle
Eastern politics in world affairs has meant that Islam is often discussed in
relation to the countries that comprise these regions and that, as a conse-
quence of this, countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, that are ‘[h]ome to
approximately one-fifth of the world’s Muslim population are often over-
looked or misrepresented in media discourses about Islam, especially those
emanating from the US and Europe’ (p. 1). In keeping with this bias is the
tendency within politics to focus on extreme or orthodox strains of Islam
which overlooks the more moderate attitudes that exist in Indonesia and
Malaysia. As the name ‘popular Islam’ suggests, the emphasis is placed on
flexibility regarding sacred writings in ways that respond to contemporary
Muslims. This is seen in the choice of contributors’ topics, for instance,
sexuality (Chapters 7, 8 and 9) and music (5, 11 and 14). Although for
orthodox Muslims music is forbidden because of its association with dance
and sexuality, which explains the ban on US music bands performing in these
countries, certain popular music has been appraised for promoting Islamic
values (p. 5). What we learn is that the identity politics in these countries
should not be viewed through the lens that examines the Islam of the Middle
East and that it is vital that the full spectrum of Islamic values are assessed to
avoid a monolithic conception of Islamic religion and culture.

5. Religion and the Visual Arts

Since the 1990s a burgeoning field of research has emerged that looks at the
relationship between the study of religions and its relationship to images and
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 99

objects. In particular questions have focused on ways of interpreting and

looking at these images with a view to expanding the horizons of the study of
religion. This field is known as religious visual culture (the term ‘material’ is
often substituted in place of ‘visual’ when the thing in question is an object
rather than an image) and represents a distinctive approach for two reasons.
Firstly, it requires a move away from the written text. Most religious trad-
itions are text based and the written word has informed the study and
analysis of the religion by scholars. Images and artefacts may have been
important in worship but discussion of them is often relegated in place of
the written word. The opportunity to consider the image as a text signals a

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shift in thinking that provides methodological validity to thinking of the
image as a thing in its own right, and not as an illustration of a scriptural
text. Its approach is different from that of art history. The emphasis in art
history is on iconography and style which implies a reduced level of engage-
ment with images and artefacts as visual practices. While art history’s remit
is about showing how images reflected, reinterpreted or critiqued textually-
based and often biblically-based ideas, religious visual culture is about making
religious studies by showing images in action. This involves thinking about
the different ritualized practices that the images and objects are employed in,
including liturgy, mediation and other forms of instruction. It constitutes a:
turn away from the study of religious artifacts themselves to an
interest in how different material and aesthetic practices form the
substance of religious life. This shift—from an ‘object-centered’ to
‘practice-centered’ approach—has meant thinking not so much about
what objects symbolize (as if they were mere instruments to get at
‘real’ religious meanings) or what traditions of representation they
reflect, but about the place of objects, images, and sounds in our
lives. (Lynch, Mitchell and Strhan [2011] p.132)
This approach concerning the visual culture of religions was inaugurated by
scholars who were working in the intersection between the two fields, such
as S. Brent Plate and David Morgan, who founded the flagship journal
Material Religion that sought to advance scholarship in this field.
The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (U Cal
P [2012]) is a recent work by Morgan, much of whose research is oriented
around religious visual culture and its histories. His pioneering work is
characterized by the genuine dialogue that emerges between visual culture
and its relationship to religion and art, and this book is yet another foray into
this territory. It builds on his earlier work The Sacred Gaze (U Cal P [2005])
that concerns itself with the spiritual significance of seeing in a host of
100 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

examples from different visual traditions as far apart as Africa, Thailand and
the US. In The Embodied Eye, Morgan develops the idea that the study of
religion involves visual practice, which implies a sensory engagement with
images and artefacts. Within Christianity there are a number of examples
which explore this and include ‘Catholic traditions of the erotic Sacred Heart
of Jesus, the unrecognizability of the Virgin in the Fatima apparitions, the
prehistory of Warner Sallman’s face of Jesus’ (back cover material). Seeing is
an important visual sense that involves more than just looking, in the sense of
glancing, and involves a certain kind of cognition and phenomenology.
Unlike the case of modernism in art history, where the visual had primacy

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over the other senses, here the visual is brought in line with the other senses
in a coming together of the self and embodiment. There are many different
types of gazes that are possible, all of which ‘[structure] social relations’
(p. 68). The emphasis on the embodied experience means that any trans-
formation that occurs operates at more than a cognitive level, and is a felt
experience that affects the whole being. Morgan expands the notion of the
gaze, which has hitherto been theorized fairly narrowly in relation to gender
and psychoanalysis, and describes it in terms of a relational exchange that is
set up between the ‘beholder’ and the image. The gazes, which involve
different attitudes, include the unilateral gaze, the apotropaic, the occlusive,
the aversive, the reciprocal, the devotional, the virtual, the communal and
the liminal gaze. Some of these gazes are conflicting but they are all share the
understanding that the gaze needs to be activated in looking. Some of these
gazes imply a religious looking where the beholder regards the image in a
certain reverential way and acts in accordance with this. This means that the
looking is not merely an aesthetic experience but is instead an act of worship.
Icon veneration in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is a form of religious
looking, where the pious beholder aspires to experience the sacred through
the religious form. The icon is the portal to the divine which the believer
accesses through contemplation. In Hinduism the tradition of darshan is
similar in that it involves a pious engagement between the beholder and
the divine, where the ideal is to receive divine grace. In these cases ‘seeing’
is an ‘embodied’ practice of engaging with the sacred, and it thereby be-
comes a way of ‘performing religious action’ (p. xiii). The study of religion
can be seen as a form of ‘visual practice’ (p. 22) that involves the engage-
ment of visual and other senses as a way of understanding the relationship of
belief. Morgan’s studies emphasize the importance of reflecting on the way
we engage and interact with images, which is something that we often do
without thinking. By getting us to think about the phenomenological pro-
cesses that are involved in looking vis-à-vis the gaze, we begin to see anew
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 101

and this rekindles our relationship with the image. In Morgan’s path-breaking
work, the image becomes a new avenue into religious practice.
Religious visual culture, as a way of reading images, and of ‘doing the-
ology’ is a growing discipline that extends traditional art historical approaches
because of its greater focus on the representation and the accommodation of
different strands of interpretation. The history of Western art comes out of a
Judaeo-Christian legacy and this is reflected in the predominance of religious
subjects that were explored throughout the centuries and especially during
the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Although artists have continued to use
religious images often to convey their personal faith, since the early twenti-

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eth-century become more common for artists to use religious images as the
basis for articulating other ideas that may not be about supporting the reli-
gious tradition. Given this paradigm shift, how are we to discuss religious
images that do not profess religious faith? One way of doing this is to account
for the different uses that the images could be put to. They can be used for the
purposes of satire or parody in order to undermine the religion or may even
be appropriated in a completely different context. Earlier in the chapter I
discussed the tendency to deploy religious images in fashion apparel where
their bright colours and strong imagery become key in kitsch culture. This
tells us something about our throwaway attitude to consumerism where signs
are replaced as soon as they are circulated and are notoriously vacuous in that
they have no further meaning than the superficial representations.
In the Western art world artists such as Gilbert & George, Mark
Wallinger and Sarah Lucas have employed religious images in unconventional
ways. The isolated uses which the images have been put to are not uncommon
and are in themselves unproblematic. The case of the artist Francis Bacon is
somewhat different because of the frequency, longevity and fervour of his
non-religious expression. My own 2012 study of Bacon’s life-long preoccu-
pation with Christian images of the crucifixion and the Pope seeks to account
for his use of religious images (Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World).
From the early 1930s until the end of his life Bacon was painting either
crucifixions or papal images. When asked about his continued use of these
symbols he maintained that he was an atheist, and denied that his employ-
ment was motivated by any religious intentions.
He would explain his use of religious symbols with recourse to
explanations of a non-religious nature, such as being struck by the
formal qualities of a particular religious image from the history of
Western art, or by the evocations and resonances of the mythic
power of the symbol. (p. 9)
102 | Religion, Spirituality and Secularism

By using religious symbols Bacon was professing a belief in the power of the
symbol and not a belief in the veracity of the symbolization or the truth of the
event. His unequivocally atheistic stance is one of the reasons that most
critics do not pursue the subject of religion in his art.
These critics willingly acknowledge the plethora of religious symbols
in Bacon’s work, but downplay their religious aspects by acknowl-
edging that he was a very visually and culturally attuned artist who
responded to the post-war times that he lived in by employing myths
and symbols that resonated with him. (p. 10)

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His statements about religion have been taken at face value and this has led to
any engagement with the religious aspects being disregarded. Such an ap-
proach is a gross misjudgement of the significance of the religious in his art
and has led to a notable gap in Bacon scholarship.
I do not suggest that we should not take Bacon’s statements at face value
nor that we should deny his atheistic pronouncements, but instead frame
these in conjunction with his paintings to show that, although Bacon rejects
the formalized conception of religion and the institutions of religion, he is,
paradoxically, dependent on the very tradition that he denounces. Bacon’s
atheism is not a simple dismissal of religion and religious belief, because he
has to work through religion in his rejection of it. He was a militant atheist
who used his art, and in particular religious images, to react against a
tradition that he felt was untrue or untenable and he needed these symbols
to express his unbelief. Bacon’s art was reactive. I argue that in his negation
of the symbols Bacon ends up reinforcing the religiosity of the symbol
because his deconstruction of the symbol is a form of reconstitution
where we as viewers are reminded of the significance of the symbol in
question. Aside from the pertinence of the subject of religion in the art
of Bacon, which remains a neglected issue, my book raises the wider ques-
tion of how to think about the various ways in which we can talk about the
uses and applications of religious symbols in complex climates that have been
variously described as post-religious, post-Christian, or secular. For many
artists (meant broadly to include musicians, writers etc.) religion is a power-
ful sphere of symbolism and expression and will continue to be employed in
their art.

Books Reviewed
Arya, Rina. Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World. Lund Humphries. [2012]
pp. 176. hb £40 ISBN 9 7818 4822 0447.
 Religion, Spirituality and Secularism | 103

Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds. Rethinking

Secularism. OUP. [2011] pp. 328. pb £14.99 ISBN 9 7801 9979 6687.
Iwamura, Jane Naomi. Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular
Culture. OUP. [2011] pp. 240. pb £17.99 ISBN 9 7801 9973 8618.
Lynch, Gordon, Jolyon Mitchell, and A. Strhan. Religion, Media and Culture.
Routledge. [2011] pp. 284. pb £24.99 ISBN 9 7804 1554 9554.
Morgan, David. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of
Feeling. U Cal P. [2012] pp. 280. pb £21.95 ISBN 9 7805 2027 2231.
Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics

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Worldwide. second edition. CUP. [2011] pp. 392. pb £20.99 ISBN 9 7811 0764
8371.
Ward, Pete. Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion and Celebrity Culture. BaylorUP.
[2011] pp. 160. pb $24.95. ISBN 9 7816 0258 1500.
Weintraub, Andrew N. Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Routledge. [2011] pp. 280. pb £26.95 ISBN 9 7804 1583 8245.
Woodhead, Linda, and Rebecca Catto. Religion and Change in Modern Britain.
Routledge. [2012] pp. 424. pb £27.99 ISBN 9 7804 1557 5812.

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