By Niall Oddy 

‘We’ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that’s where we need to start.’ These words emphasising the significance of faith in British society were uttered last month by Nigel Farage, the leader of the political party Reform UK.[i] But is religion really important in Britain? After all, the 2021 census indicated that less the half of the population of England and Wales considered themselves to be Christian and over half of Scottish people declared themselves to have no religion.[ii]

The relationship between religious identity and national identity is contentious. In contrast to Farage’s claim that British identity has ‘Judeo-Christian’ underpinnings, the National Secular Society campaigns to lessen the influence of religion in British society.[iii] Debates about the role of religion in society have a long history, and in this blog post I want to travel back to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation had unsettled the religious uniformity that had long prevailed in most of western Europe.

The spread of Protestantism forced governments to grapple with how to respond. In England, Henry VIII broke from Rome to establish an independent Church of England. In France, the monarchy remained steadfastly Catholic. Yet, around 10% of France’s population of 15 million converted to the Calvinist branch of Protestantism. Hardline Catholics opposed religious freedoms for this large minority. The monarchy’s attempts to broker compromise failed, leading to over three decades of warfare known as the French Wars of Religion (1562 – 98).

France was not the only country to experience bloodshed as a result of the Reformation. In fact, refugees fleeing religious persecution were so common that the historian Heiko Oberman coined the phrase the ‘Reformation of the Refugees’.[iv] John Calvin was one of over 5,000 French people who fled to the safety of Geneva as the city doubled in size. Basel, Strasbourg and Zurich were also safe places for exiles. As many as 100,000 Protestants from the Low Countries (Netherlands and Belgium) fled to cities in England and the Holy Roman Empire, including London, Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt. Not every Protestant was a refugee, but enough were that exile was a significant and well-known part of Protestant experience, identity and culture. Religious reformers were conscious of belonging to a pan-European community that had suffered persecution and exile from their homeland.

The refugee experience can help us to think about the relationship between religious identity and national identity. What does it mean to have to leave your country of birth because of your religious identity? How does that feel? A travel account by one French Calvinist, Jean de Léry (1536 – 1613), offers some insights.

Born in France, Léry studied in Geneva, became a Calvinist minister and got embroiled in the French Wars of Religion. He was in Sancerre with many fellow Protestants in 1572 when Catholic forces began an eight-month siege that resulted in starvation and acts of cannibalism. Léry survived and eventually settled in Switzerland.

In 1578 Léry published an account of the time he spent in Brazil in 1557 – 58. His History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil recounted how he went with a group of Calvinists to assist with the establishment of a French colony. After some months, disagreements with the Catholics there about religious practices led to Léry and his co-religionists being expelled from the French fort. They spent time living with the indigenous Tupinamba people before returning to France.

In his published account Léry explores his split loyalties to his country and his faith.  He calls France ‘my homeland’ and of himself writes, ‘native Frenchman that I am, desirous of the honour of my prince’.[v] Monarchy, though, was problematic from the point of a Calvinist subject to a Catholic king. Writing twenty years after his return from Brazil, and having witnessed the horrors of the Wars of Religion, Léry is nostalgic about his time across the Atlantic and expresses his ‘regret’ that he is not there. For him, Brazil represented a potential safe haven from Catholic France and an opportunity to resolve the contradictions between religion and nationhood:

‘if we had stayed longer in that country, we would have drawn and won some of them to Jesus Christ [and…] there would be at present more than ten thousand Frenchmen who, besides staunchly protecting our island and our fort against the Portuguese […] would now possess under allegiance to our King a great country in the land of Brazil’.

Léry here blames the Catholics for the failure of the colony, expressing a belief that if the Calvinists had not been forced out, he would have been able to perform a service for both his faith and his country.

Continue reading →

By Paul-Francois Tremlett

Why were some Rastafari communities sceptical of the Covid vaccine? Why do some white, American evangelicals see the world through a lens of Biblical apocalypse? Over two days in January (20-21-01-25) an inter-disciplinary team of scholars assembled at the Open University to discuss the role of religious institutions, actors and communities in challenging but also in generating mis- and disinformation.

Organised by Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody from POLIS and Dr Paul-François Tremlett from Religious Studies, discussions focused around a cluster of themes including democracy, polarisation, social media and strategies for challenging disinformation, with papers engaging a range of contexts and case studies from China, the Philippines, Turkey, Ukraine, and the USA. From Satanic panics to millenarian dispensationalism, and from Covid scepticism among Rastafari to Pastoral letters condemning electoral manipulation, despite an abundance of examples of religious institutions, actors and communities as information actors, this is yet to coalesce into a research field.

The Religion and Disinformation Workshop highlights the role of religion in information networks and is funded by the Open Societal Challenges (OSC) at the Open University, and is seeking to lead research in the area. The workshop reflects one of the main aims of Democracy, Disinformation and Religion (DDR), which is to engage in and promote cross-disciplinary research on the understudied role of religious institutions and communities as information actors.

In the photograph, the workshop participants are gathered for the conference dinner. For further information about the project see Democracy, Disinformation and Religion (DDR) | Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and/or get in touch with precious.chatterje-doody@open.ac.uk or paul-francois.tremlett@open.ac.uk.

By Friederike Uebel

As the creator of this artwork, I aimed to juxtapose the harsh reality of industrial agriculture with the gentler, sustainable practices of traditional farming. This piece serves as a stark reminder of the impact our choices have on biodiversity and the environment.

The centrepiece of the image is a museum exhibit, displaying various animals we still have today, but eerily labelled as extinct a century from now. The red deer, a species not currently critically endangered, is prominently featured. Its presence highlights the looming threat that industrial agriculture poses to flora and fauna. The exhibit is a forewarning, a projection of what might come if we continue on our current path.

Through the museum windows, the scene outside is twofold. On one side, a tractor sprays pesticides over a field under ominous grey clouds, symbolizing the destructive consequences of industrial farming. The pesticides, drifting like a toxic shroud, are a direct contributor to biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.

Contrasting this, the other side of the window shows people working the land with traditional methods. This ‘Window of Opportunity’ represents the potential for positive change. It suggests that by adopting sustainable practices, we can alter the trajectory of our future on Earth.

Through this artwork, I strive to evoke a sense of urgency and contemplation, encouraging viewers to reflect on the paths we tread and the legacy we wish to leave behind. It is both a warning and a beacon of hope, reminding us that the future of our planet rests in our hands.

Continue reading →

By Chris Cotter 

At the end of October 2024, I had the pleasure of speaking on a keynote panel session as part of RExChange 2024 on what AI means for knowledge in the religion and worldviews classroom. I was speaking alongside Professor Beth Singler – who did an excellent job of providing a sweeping overview of almost everything “AI” could mean for the study of religion, with some fascinating examples – and Dr Michael Burdett – who provided a thought-provoking discussion of various ethical and philosophical issues presented by AI for the teaching of “religion”, broadly conceived. My contribution was sandwiched between these two and, given that much of my thinking now is taken up with the OU student experience, and potential uses and abuses of generative AI, I decided to engage with ChatGPT head on, from a critical religious studies perspective. You can view the full session and ensuing discussion here.

Before going much further, I should state that by “critical religious studies perspective” I mean one like we adopt at the Open University which acknowledges, to quote Jonathan Jong, that

“there is no such thing that answers to the name ‘religion’”, but only phenomena that “we habitually label religious” for historically contingent reasons (Jong 2015, 20).

In his A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, Craig Martin (2017, 156) argues that rather than asking questions like, for example, “Is she Catholic?” we should ask:

• Who is identified by
• Whom as
• What, and
• With what social effects?

These are the sorts of questions that animated my recent engagement with ChatGPT (currently in its fourth iteration – “GPT-4”), which is a large language model that can do everything from “answering” questions and “composing” songs, to summarizing texts and attempting to answer essay questions (all to varying degrees of success).

Asking GPT-4 about religion: the good

First off, it should be noted that when prompted with a variety of questions related to the category of “religion”, much of what GPT-4 comes up with is pretty good. It is, after all, basically doing your Googling for you and producing a summary of material available to it.

[Side note: its results should thus be treated with the same level of care and scepticism with which good scholarship would treat any web page].

For example, when I asked it “what is religion?”, it produced a defensible list (with definitions) of what the concept “typically involves” – beliefs, practices, moral and ethical guidelines, community, sacred texts and traditions, and spiritual experience – and concluded that the “specifics of what constitutes a religion can vary greatly between different cultures and belief systems, and the boundaries of what is considered a religion can be fluid”. Sure, there are issues with this, but as a general introduction, I was quite surprised at the level of nuance. I was similarly pleased with responses to prompts such as “What do Muslims believe?”, “Is religion a force for good?”, or even “design a teaching activity for 12-year-olds on the nature of religion”.

Asking GPT-4 about religion: the bad

On the other hand, there are times where the responses are woefully bad. For example, I asked it about my own work with the prompt “What is Christopher R. Cotter’s perspective on religion?” It did get some things right – that I adopt a critical interdisciplinary approach “drawing from sociology [yes], religious studies [yes], and cultural studies [kind of]”, and that I am interested in “a deeper understanding of how religion functions in contemporary society and how it intersects with various social and cultural phenomena” [yes, but vague].

It also informed me that I am interested in how “new religious movements interact with and differ from traditional religions” [I mean, I am, but not in much depth] and attributed the book “Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods” to myself and someone called Matt James [I have not written this book, and do not know a Matt James, although the title is a partial copy of Paul Hedges’ recent work Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies]. This is an example of what is known as an AI hallucination.

Asking GPT-4 about religion: the ugly

Finally, some of what GPT-4 produces is worryingly problematic from a critical perspective. I’ll share three examples.

Thinking about common dietary prohibitions, I prompted GPT-4 with “Do Muslims eat pork?” and “Do Jews eat pork?” Again, the answers provided were not terrible, acknowledging the history and precedent of this dietary prohibition in these traditions, as well as reflecting on its observance and cultural impact. However, in response to the “Muslims” prompt, I was immediately greeted with the definitive statement “No, Muslims do not eat pork”, with GPT-4 concluding that “Muslims worldwide adhere to this prohibition.” When “Jews” was substituted into the prompt, the opening gambit was “No, observant Jews do not eat pork”, with the conclusion being that the prohibition is “upheld by observant Jews.” This prompted some questions:

• Why is one group treated as a monolith (i.e., that they all do this), while the other is allowed some nuance via the qualifier “observant”?
• If someone identifies as Muslim but does eat pork, are they then excluded from the category of Muslim?
• What does it mean to be an “observant Jew”, and can one not be “observant” whilst also eating pork?
• Who decides on these boundary markers, and what will their social effects be?
• Why is GPT-4 being so definitive, when we know that there are numerous, sincere, self-identifying Muslims and Jews who do consume pork, and who do not consider this to be a problem?

Turning to another prompt, when I asked “Do Muslims drink alcohol?”, I was greeted with a definitive “No, Muslims do not drink alcohol” and, after some useful historical context, the conclusion was that “practicing Muslims abstain from drinking alcohol as part of their adherence to Islamic teachings.” This time GPT-4 is willing to acknowledge some Muslim diversity with the addition of “practicing” but, again, the implication is that Muslims who do drink alcohol are not practicing – and therefore, presumably, less authentic? – even though there are many sincere “practicing Muslims” who do consume alcohol. Yes, the consumption of alcohol would be condemned by many Muslim authorities, but someone consulting GPT-4 would come away with the conclusion that these voices were the only correct ones, and that those who might oppose them – if they exist at all – are lesser in some way.

Finally, when prompted with “Do Catholics have premarital sex?” the immediate response has a different inflection: “The official teaching of the Catholic Church is that premarital sex is not permissible.” After discussing some of the reasoning behind this stance, GPT-4 then acknowledged that “it’s important to recognize that individual Catholics may have varying levels of adherence to this teaching. In practice, some Catholics may engage in premarital sex, but this is considered contrary to Church teachings…”. Here, we see diversity acknowledged, and no exclusion taking place: officially they aren’t supposed to, but many do. Why is there no qualifier “practicing” or “observant” added here, when it was for Muslims and Jews? Why is the acknowledgement of “lived” digression from “official” teachings made so effortlessly here, and not in those other cases?

The simple fact is that GPT-4’s responses are dictated by the material it has been “trained” with, the presumptions of the team behind its coding and production, and the prompts provided by users. And thus, the biases, stereotypes and emphases that dominate in each of these arenas – explicitly or implicitly – will literally be written into the responses GPT-4 produces.

Above, I quoted Craig Martin’s critical questions:

• Who is identified by
• Whom as
• What, and
• With what social effects? (2017, 156)

Using the example of Muslims and alcohol consumption, this results in the following:

• Muslims who drink alcohol are identified by the team behind Chat-GPT as not being “practicing Muslims”, resulting in their exclusion from the dominant model of “proper” Islam, and the potential perpetuation of stereotypes, disapproval, and reprobation from within and outside the “Muslim community”.

Continue reading →

By Erin Geraghty

In August 1952, at the Annual Conference of the Rationalist Press Association in Leicester, Marie Stopes bumped into an old acquaintance, Avro Manhattan. The focus of the conference that year was ‘The Menace of Roman Catholicism’; a topic which both Avro and Marie were already well acquainted. This was not the first meeting of these two figures— they had met briefly before the war and were both part of a literary circle in the UK that encompassed writers like H.G Wells, George Bernard Shaw etc—but it was this encounter that sparked the close friendship that would quickly form a love affair.

Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was a scientist and birth control campaigner. She famously wrote the controversial sex manual, Married Love (1918) and set up the first birth control clinic in the UK. The promotion of contraception provoked conflict with the Roman Catholic Church throughout her career. After many unsuccessful attempts to disseminate her work on the BBC, she felt utterly censored and concluded that Catholics had infiltrated the BBC and the film industry in the UK and sought to destroy her work. Her fight with the Roman Catholic Church was also legal; in the 1920s she lost a high-profile libel case and various subsequent appeals against a Roman Catholic doctor who had accused her of using the poor as an experiment in birth control. By the 1950s, this conflict with the Catholic Church in its various forms entirely consumed her; believing that Catholics had their ungodly tentacles into every aspect of political, social, and cultural life of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the USA.

Marie Stopes, (1918)

Baron Avro Manhattan (1914-1990) was an Italian aristocrat, writer, poet, and artist who had been exiled during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and resided in the UK permanently after 1945. During the Second World War, Avro ran a clandestine freedom radio, broadcasting to Italian and French partisans over the BBC. As mentioned, he was also a writer, and his chosen interest was the global danger of the Roman Catholic Church. His book, The Catholic Church Against the Twentieth Century (1947) argued that the Catholic Church sought the spiritual and political domination over modern society throughout the world (p. 450). His work, The Vatican in World Politics (1949) was a bestseller. In 1952, Avro was handsome, accomplished, and shared many of the same opinions as Stopes on religion, eugenics, and, most importantly, the Roman Catholic Church.

Avro Manhattan (1957)

The meeting of Avro Manhattan and Marie Stopes in Leicester in 1952 was cut prematurely short. Avro had come down with a bad case of tonsillitis and left the conference early, much to the displeasure of Marie. Just days after the conference, Marie sent a letter enquiring after his health and seeking further information about Japan and Roman Catholicism—the topic of their conversation that had so enthused Marie. Unsatisfied with his response, Marie went out and bought his most recent work, Catholic Imperialism and World Freedom (1952), and read it immediately. She declared this work to be ‘a monumental and quite terrifying presentation of the urgent problem these devilish R.C.’s have concocted!’[1] In the book, Avro had built upon his earlier work concerning Roman Catholicism in the twentieth century, arguing this time that the Catholic Church sought ‘world domination… not only as a spiritual, but also as a political power, buttressed by the unshakeable conviction that it is her destiny to conquer the planet’ (page ix). Marie echoed this same argument at an Oxford Union debate in 1955, explaining that ‘the Roman Catholic Church was determined, by its very constitution, to become the only religion, and to destroy every other religion’.[2]

Continue reading →