Religious Studies and Generative AI – A Critical Perspective

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”.

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An Anti-Catholic Love Story

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]

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Image credit: drawing of the “Dancing Sorcerer” from the Cave of the Trois-Frères, Ariège, France, ~13,000 BCE. Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/xzbkmv33 CC-BY-4.0

Magic Words: The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

By David Robertson

“The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”

― Alan Moore, From Hell

Alan Moore is often described as the greatest British comic book writer of all time. His works, including Watchmen, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have expanded the boundaries of the genre, while inspiring a number of disappointing film adaptations. But his dissatisfaction with the predatory and immature industry has led him to turn his attention to prose instead. After two decades passed between his first novel, The Voice of the Fire (1996) and his second, Jerusalem (2016), his latest two works have just been published weeks apart. While Jerusalem was an expansive modernist masterpiece (and one of the longest novels published in English), The Great When is a highly readable (and surprisingly short) thriller set in 1940s London, and the first of a projected series called Long London. In The Great When, the central character finds himself entering a higher, eternal version of London, in which reality is mutable, ideas can move around as beings, and the great events, people and places of London all exist simultaneously.

However, I’m going to focus here on his second new book, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, cowritten with Steve Moore. Rather than a novel, The Bumper Book of Magic is a compendium of essays, comic strips and allsorts about the magical arts, presented in the style of the annuals that pre-internet children will remember receiving at Christmastime. Not the card tricks and rabbits out of hats type of magic, however, but the kind associated with occultism and paganism. Because Moore is arguably also our most famous magician – certainly the only one to have appeared on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.

Moore was introduced to magic by his co-author, who passed away suddenly at a relatively early stage in its composition. On his 50th birthday, Alan Moore began to practice in earnest, and in the years since he has developed an innovative and modern idea of what constitutes magic, which has informed all his published work since.

Although, as Moore himself writes, we can trace the history of magic back to the earliest evidence we have of human societies (such as the “Dancing Sorcerer”, above), today’s ideas about magic can largely be traced to the mid- to late-nineteenth century, in a movement that is sometimes called the “Victorian Occult Revival”. It was a synthesis of a number of older European esoteric traditions including Christian mysticism, Rosicrucianism, esoteric forms of freemasonry (particularly in continental Europe) and kabbalism, an eclectic tradition mixing Jewish mysticism with Neoplatonic ideas. Figures including French writer Éliphas Lévi, Helena Blavatsky, Samuel McGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley combined and systematised these, adding ideas from places like Egypt, India and China, whose own esoteric and religious traditions were being (re)discovered through translations that were becoming available to wealthier European audiences.

They also added more modern ideas, including scientific methodologies, evolution and particularly Freudian psychological concepts. For many in this milieu, the beings of medieval magic were perhaps best understood as aspects of our own psyche – although often with a Jungian twist that on a certain level, our own psyche was connected to a larger group psyche, or “collective unconscious”. Both Blavatsky and Crowley were explicit that these higher levels and the beings who abide there were explorable using scientific methods. Crowley’s journal, The Equinox, declared on its frontispiece, “the aim of religion, the method of science” (see image). As such, whilst portraying magic as an ancient tradition, all of these figures were actually presenting a brand-new synthesis, incorporating modern ideas as to what was meant by these ancient techniques.

The Victorian occult revival burned out in the early years of the 20th century, and it wasn’t until the emergence of the New Age movement in the late 60s and early 70s that these ideas became popular in the counterculture again. These were very different times however, and a new interpretation of magic emerged that represented the zeitgeist better. “Chaos Magic” in some ways echoed the DIY aesthetic of the punk movement, stripping the ceremonial trappings of Victorian magic away to focus on the practical applications. Much of it however was elaborations of techniques from people influenced by Crowley, for example, the use of sigils developed by Austin Osman Spare, small, improvised glyphs which encoded statements of your will in a graphical format, as well as expanding the idea of invoking gods and demons to invoking figures from fiction popular culture such as the Elder Gods of HP Lovecraft’s fiction, as pioneered by Kenneth Grant. However, it abandoned the psychological explanations of magic in favor of one which drew from the emerging cyberculture of the 1980s (which itself was in some ways a development of the New Age movement) to talk of reprogramming the Source Code of reality, or hacking ones’ own consciousness.

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What does Europe mean to you? What role does religion play, if any, in your understanding of Europe?

By Niall Oddy

The continent is home to people who identify with a range of different religions and to people who express no religious affiliation.[i] There has never been a time in history when everyone in Europe practised the same religion. Nonetheless, given many centuries of the predominance of Christianity, it has been suggested that Europe’s culture is Christian. One of the proponents of this idea, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has claimed that Europe is under threat from non-Christian migrants.[ii] In contrast, the stated values of the European Union are secular: human dignity, freedom (including freedom of religion), democracy, equality, rule of law, and human rights.[iii]

The opposition between a Christian view of the continent and a secular view is just one way in which there is uncertainty about what Europe represents. There are plenty of others. Picture in your mind the map of the continent. Where is the eastern boundary between Europe and Asia? The responses to this question vary from person to person. Do you include some, all, or none of the Russian Federation within the borders of Europe? What about Belarus, Turkey, Georgia?

Disagreements about Europe are not new. They have a long history. In my book, Writing Europe in Renaissance France: Travels in Reality and Imagination, I examine debates about Europe as far back as the sixteenth century. This has been regarded as an important period in the development of the idea of Europe for two main reasons. First, this was the age of Europeans’ first truly global encounters, when they started to colonise the Americas and parts of Africa and Asia. This gave rise to a Eurocentric world view, in which Europeans saw themselves as sharing a common culture that was different from, and superior, to the rest of the world. Second, the sixteenth century witnessed the violent conflicts that emerged as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Prior to this, people across the continent had been united by a shared allegiance to Christendom, but this was destroyed as Catholics and the various new Protestant churches turned against each other. As such, Europe began to replace Christendom as a marker of an overarching identity.

Europe, however, did not emerge as a clear, unambiguous concept. Instead, it inherited many of Christendom’s contradictions. Often used by western Christians to refer exclusively to the Latin Church centred on Rome, Christendom was sometimes used to include eastern Orthodox Christians. This inconsistent pattern of inclusion and exclusion was reflected when the word Europe became more common. Sixteenth-century geography books described the people of Europe as stronger and healthier, with a more advanced urban culture, than the people of Asia, Africa and America. They identified the eastern boundary of Europe as the Tanais river (known today as the Don, it flows through Russia into the Sea of Azov), which included most of the Orthodox Christian Tsardom of Muscovy (the much smaller state from which the present-day Russian Federation claims descent), the Muslim Crimean Khanate, and parts of the Ottoman Empire, which stretched as far west as Hungary. However, the same geography books also described Poland, whose rulers were Catholic, as the frontier of Europe, thereby excluding the primarily Orthodox and Muslims lands to the east. Europe was not a neutral geographical concept, but an emotive cultural and ideological marker, the boundaries of which were imprecise.

Writing Europe in Renaissance France focusses on the factors that shaped how people understood Europe differently. Take André Thevet, the Catholic chaplain of a French expedition to establish a colony in Brazil. He praised the Spanish conquest of Peru, calling it ‘a new Europe’. For him, Europe was a cultural model of superiority that justified overseas empire-building. By contrast, Jean de Léry, who also travelled to Brazil, wrote of a Europe ravaged by conflict. He was a Calvinist who fought against Catholics in the French Wars of Religion and did not feel a shared identity with his religious enemies.

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The Last Acceptable Prejudice? Is it OK to Hate Catholicism?

By John Wolffe

At a time when there is rightly widespread concern about antisemitism and Islamophobia it may seem counter-intuitive to focus attention on a currently less conspicuous form of religious and anti-religious prejudice, anti-Catholicism. However, this is just what we shall be doing over the next three years with a grant from the Leverhulme Trust to explore ‘Anti-Catholicism in the UK since 1945: An Interdisciplinary Study of Prejudice’.

‘The last acceptable prejudice’ is the subtitle of a study by Philip Jenkins of anti-Catholicism in the present-day United States which raises significant questions for the UK. Jenkins argues that anti-Catholic prejudice remains widespread in America and is ‘acceptable’ because it is closely associated with otherwise liberal and progressive causes such as contraception, the rights of women and LGBTQIA+ people. Moreover, sexual abuse by Catholic priests is perceived as symptomatic of overall institutional failure and corruption. When Pope Benedict XVI made a state visit to Britain in September 2010, a ‘Protest the Pope’ rally in central London highlighted similar concerns.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Protest_the_Pope_Rally#/media/File:2010_protest_the_pope_rally.png:~:text=By%20www.CGPGrey.com%2C%20CC%20BY%202.0%2C%20https%3A//commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php%3Fcurid%3D11534198

While these issues appear highly contemporary, anti-Catholicism in Britain has a long history, dating back to the Reformation. Indeed, the very word ‘Protestant’ originated in that initial protest against the authority of the Papacy and the Catholic hierarchy. Our project focuses on the much more recent past but still covers a long period of enormous change, beginning with the immediate post-Second World War period, when the religious transformations of the 1960s including the Second Vatican Council still lay in the future. We will also be taking a ‘four nations’ approach, contrasting the normally more muted anti-Catholicism of England and Wales, with the more overt sectarianism notably evident in the ‘Old Firm’ rivalry of Celtic and Rangers in Scotland, and in the ongoing divisions between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ communities in Northern Ireland. The latter are deeply rooted in Irish history, as illustrated by this Orange Order banner commemorating the siege of Drogheda by Oliver Cromwell’s forces in 1649.

Orange march, Belfast 12 July 2011, Photo: John Bell, used with permission.

The project will be a collaboration between two historians, myself and our newly-appointed colleague Dr Erin Geraghty, and a team of psychologists, including Prof Jovan Byford and Prof John Dixon. In bringing together historical and psychological approaches to the study of prejudice, we shall seek to develop deeper understanding of anti-Catholicism through exploring a variety of questions. How has the balance between ‘traditional’ Protestant anti-Catholicism and more contemporary secular anti-Catholicism shifted over the last eighty years? What exactly are those with anti-Catholic views opposed to? – Catholics as individuals, the Catholic Church as an institution, the Pope in particular? In what ways can people brought up as Catholics become anti-Catholic?  How might we clarify the boundary between legitimate criticism of Catholicism on theological or moral grounds, and less rational prejudiced attitudes? What overt and more subtle forms does prejudice itself take? How do these differences help us to understand the diverse political and religious characteristics of different parts of the UK?

Our wider ambition is through the case study of anti-Catholicism to show how history, religious studies and psychology can complement each other in developing methodologies that enable us better to understand other forms of prejudice. We look forward to reporting on the progress of the project in future contributions to this blog.

“Hate marches”: How Politicians weaponise religious identity?

By David Robertson

On March 1st, Rishi Sunak gave his first Prime Ministerial address from the steps of 10 Downing Street. It was late on a Friday afternoon, and apparently organised rather hastily. What necessitated such an urgent, national response?

“A shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality”, Sunak said, which “demands a response not just from government, but from all of us”. As many commentators noted, it was not clear exactly what “extremist disruption and violence” he was referring to. The protest marches against Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been one of the largest and most peaceful in British history, with arrest rates way lower than the Glastonbury Festival or a Premier League football match. The only violence that has been seen was not from the protestors at all, but by counter-protestors, including individuals formerly associated with the far-right English Defence League, after being encouraged by the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

Yet, according to Sunak,

Jewish children fearful to wear their school uniform lest it reveal their identity. Muslim women abused in the street for the actions of a terrorist group they have no connection with… You can be a practising Hindu and a proud Briton as I am. Or a devout Muslim and a patriotic citizen as so many are. Or a committed Jewish person and the heart of your local community… and all underpinned by the tolerance of our established, Christian church.

It seems clear that Sunak was not responding  to any real threat, but rather attempting to deflect from a wave of his ministers being accused of racism and Islamophobia, provide cover for the Commons’ Speaker Lindsay Hoyle breaking Parliamentary procedure to pass Labour’s ceasefire motion rather than the SNP’s more critical one, and to connect all this with the protests which have taken place weekly across the UK since October 2023 and which directly oppose the Government’s position of support for Israel’s military actions. These protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, organised according to the law with the support of the Police, and do not represent an extremist minority, but rather the views of 66% of the population today, up from 59% in November 2023. Nor are the protestors predominantly Muslim, but represent a cross-section of the British public—including many Jewish people.

But from Sunak’s speech, and Michael Gove’s widely criticised redefinition of extremism which followed, you would get the impression of a state of emergency, almost a civil war in which the Christian majority are embattled with a wave of Muslim immigrants.

The reality could hardly be more different. As shown by the 2021 census, we know that the percentage of the English population identifying as Christian has been dropping at a steady rate of 1.3% of the population per year since at least 2001, and was 46.2% in 2021 (in Scotland it is even lower). The UK is no longer a Christian majority country, and if current trends continue, will be a majority “No Religion” by the next census. And for all Sunak and Gove’s scaremongering, there is no wave of Muslim immigrants threatening the UK. They amount for only 6.5% of the population, 3.9 million, an increase of only 800,000 (the number of people on the biggest London march) over the last decade.

Figure 1. UK Religion 2011 Census

 

(Religious composition, 2011 and 2021, England and Wales. Source: ONS. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021)

The decline of Christian identification was matched by a rise in “no religion”, not Islam. So to frame the protests as two religions clashing, as Sunak does, is at best ignorant, and at worst risks heightening tensions and even encouraging violence, as Braverman did when she called peace protests “hate marches” and accused the police of double standards (implying religious discrimination in favour of Muslims).

So what’s going on? The politics of Israel-Gaza are a factor, to be sure, but there are other influences at work here. While the antisemitism crisis in the Labour Party under Corbyn is well-known, there have been regular accusations of Islamophobia within the Conservative party since at least 2011, notably including by the Tory Peer Baroness Warsi who said it “right up to the top” of the Party. The Muslim Council of Britain accused the Tories of responding with “denial, dismissal and deceit” after Boris Johnson wrote in The Spectator that “To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia—fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke.” In 2019, anti-Muslim incidents almost quadrupled after Johnson described a woman wearing a burqa as “looking like a bank robber” in a newspaper column. Deputy Party Chairman Lee Anderson was fired for stating that London Mayor Sadiq Khan was under the control of “Islamists”. It’s not just MPs—a 2020 report by Hope Not Hate found that 57% of Conservative Party members had a negative attitude towards Islam also.

Michael Gove has been accused of anti-Muslim rhetoric previously, however. In 2006, he published Celsius 7/7, which argues for a “widespread reluctance to acknowledge the real scale and nature of the Islamist terror threat” from “a sizeable minority” of British Muslims holding “rejectionist Islamist views” which he describes as comparable to the threat from Nazism. Citing the “clash of civilisations” thesis argued by Bernard Lewis, “the chief ideologue of post-9/11 politics of hate towards Islam and Muslims”, its many errors of fact are best addressed by William Dalrymple’s review. Gove was heavily criticised for his handling of the so-called “Trojan Horse” affair in Birmingham in 2014, in which fraudulent letters accusing Muslims of attempting to “infiltrate” schools were taken so seriously that Gove appointed the former head of the Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism unit as Education Commissioner. It should not therefore be surprising that several Muslim groups are singled out as targeted by Gove’s new “extremism” definition.

Figure 2. Protests in Edinburgh. Photo: David Robertson

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Religion and Calendars: Sakha Moons and Summer Solstice

By Liudmila Nikanorova 

For centuries, even for millennia, human life and activities have been measured in time. While the majority of people are now used to the standardised units of time, such as seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years, the organisation of these units through calendars can be very diverse. There are over forty calendars in use today. Some of them are sun-based, like the Gregorian solar calendar used in the UK since 1750. There are also lunisolar calendars that follow the movements of the moon, like the Chinese, Jewish, and Islamic calendars.

Religion is closely intertwined with the organisation of calendars. Holidays in different countries can indicate which religion has the strongest presence in the nation-state. In most European countries, for example, Christmas and Easter are the largest public holidays indicating the strong presence of Christianity in Europe.

Another example is when the Soviet Union introduced new holidays to replace the Orthodox Christian ones following the Russian Revolution in 1917. This measure was supposed to mark the transition from the “dark religious” Russian Empire to the “modern secular” Soviet state, where religion was regarded as “the opium of the people.”

The names of the units of time can also inform about the main activities of the people. The calendar of the Sakha (Yakut) people from North-East Asia, for instance, reflects environmental and agricultural cycles central to the life of the Sakha. This is particularly evident in the Sakha names of months:

 

Kulun Tutar yia [March] – the month of foal catching.

Sakha people have been historically horse herders and have incorporated products made from mare’s milk into their diet. During this month, foals are captured and separated from the mares to facilitate the milking process. Kymys, a drink made from fermented mare’s milk, is not only a local delicacy but an important part of Sakha ceremonies and festivities.

Figure 1. Running foals of the Sakha breed (all photos are taken by the author)

 

Muus ustar yia [April] – the month of ice drift.

Sakha Sire [Sa. ‘the land of the Sakha’] is located in one of the coldest regions of the planet, where rivers and lakes freeze during the winter months. The thawing of the Lena River, one of the largest rivers in the world, is a time of excitement but also anxiety, as it often leads to floods in the region.

 

Yem yia [Mai] – the month of spawning.

Lake fishing, especially for sobo, a fish belonging to the same family as carp, has been one of the main subsistence practices among the Sakha. This month marks the spawning season for sobo fish.

Figure 2. Frozen sobo fish inside the ice installation

 

Bes yia [June] – the month of a pine tree.

This month not only indicates the arrival of summer, when trees turn green, but also the specific period for harvesting resin from the Siberian pine.

 

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Over twenty-five years of Yoga Studies: the birth of a sub-discipline of Religious Studies

By Suzanne Newcombe

Recently I was asked to reflect upon the growth of the field of ‘Yoga Studies’ – the academic study of yoga in the disciplines of yoga and social sciences to celebrate a decade of successful graduates from the MA in Yoga Studies at SOAS.  The evening celebratory event was enthusiastically well attended by at least one-third of the graduates of the programme.

This occasion made me feel both old and grateful that I could reflect upon the establishment of Yoga Studies as a sub-field through lived experience. I started researching contemporary or ‘modern yoga’ (although it wasn’t yet a term) in 2002 as part of an MSc in the Sociology of Religion. My question then was what are the beliefs of yoga practitioners and how do they relate to religion? (For more how I framed and answered the question at the time, see Hasselle-Newcombe 2005)

But as I was doing this research I realised there were more basic and obvious questions.

  • Why was doing something called ‘yoga’ both incredibly common and normal? Wasn’t yoga something from another culture? How and why did this happen?

I realised that these questions would keep me busy for a PhD, which I began in 2003 and was eventually published as a monograph Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis (2019).

But of course, I wasn’t the only one interested in this question. Elizabeth de Michelis’ A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism (2004), marked a pivotal moment, defining ‘modern yoga’ as a practice with distinct characteristics from its premodern roots. During the same year, Joseph Alter’s Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy was also published. In the next two decades these books were followed but an exponentially increasing number of academic publications and insights.

I was lucky enough to be part of many of the initial discussions facilitated by Elizabeth de Michelis as the director of the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research at the University of Cambridge between 2000 to 2006. She brought together most of the scattered scholars in the social sciences and humanities who were looking at contemporary yoga for a series of conferences and workshops.

My PhD research was very much shaped by these dialogues, particularly through discussions with Elizabeth and Mark Singleton undertaking the PhD research which underpins Yoga Body (2010) at the time. The extant academic research on yoga was possible to keep in my head during my PhD. But now I must do a fresh literature search every time I want to write about the field because something new has always been published by someone I’ve not yet encountered.

The questions from which I started my PhD research were naïve, general and basic. Now the questions that preoccupy the growing number of yoga researchers are more nuanced and much more specific, for example:

  • How are the soteriological goals of yoga expressed in different times and places? What are the commonalities and differences in these goals and experiences?
  • How do the experiences of yoga practice relate to more contemporary psychological descriptors such as flow, absorption – or modern ideas of ‘concentration’ and meditation?
  • What other traditions of physical and spiritual practice have been incorporated into contemporary yoga contexts? When and how do these transformations of practices occur?
  • How have our current understandings of ‘meditation’ and ‘yoga’ been established? Do these words adequately describe either the experiences or motivations of practitioners?
  • How might we use the nuanced discussions found in historical texts to explore the nuances of practitioner experiences and diversity of practices found in contemporary yoga and meditation?
  • Where, how and in what ways does yoga recapitulate power imbalances and systemic oppressions? How does this happen in similar and distinct ways in different times and places?

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Westminster Education Policy Briefing: innovative pedagogies for teaching religious diversity

By John Maiden 

On 18 January 2024, the Open University and the project Religious Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA), was mentioned as an “exciting” teaching innovation during a Lords Grand Committee on Religious Education in schools. The project was described as presenting young people with an opportunity to “think outside the box about their own experiences of religious diversity, tolerance and intolerance”. The following week, the OU team was able to follow up on this with an education policy briefing event in Westminster. Here we presented some of the outcomes and potentialities of the project, and particularly our ‘Docutubes’ methodology. This is an approach through which young people have been encouraged to learn creatively about religious diversity in past, present and their own experiences, by writing, making and editing their own short films.

The Docutubes approach was first developed as part of a Horizon 2020 funded project in collaboration with various universities and partners across Europe. Since this has ended, further support from the Culham St Gabriel Trust and the OU’s Open Societal Challenges programme, has enabled the OU team to test the methodology in a number of new contexts, including the Muslim-majority countries of Albania and Jordan, in a wider range of English schools, and in both a Protestant and Catholic school in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

In the first half of the policy event, members of the project team, John Maiden, Stefanie Sinclair and John Wolffe, along with Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse, a RETOPEA colleague from KU Leuven, explained the Docutubes approach. We spoke about how engaging young people with an accessible online archive of primary sources – ‘thinking like historians’ – and then the creative learning approach of Docutubes, had demonstrated the potential to address common ‘presentist’ understandings of the religious diversity. Specifically, the approach is able to challenge the widely held views about the past which associate religion with conflict. We then heard from two educators, Richard Brown (Head Teacher, Urswick School, London) and Ruairi Geehan (Mercy College, Belfast) about their experiences of RETOPEA, as well as Dr Renee Hattar, Director of the Jordanian Royal Institute of Interfaith Studies, which hosted a Doctubes workshop in 2023. Finally, a young people who had experienced a Docutubes workshop described his own positive experiences of the project, working alongside young people from other religious traditions, in the context of an interfaith youth camp organised by the Rose Castle Foundation.

In the second half (pictured), we heard responses from expert practitioners in the fields of teaching, peace-making and interfaith: Helen Snelson (Teacher Education, University of York, Chair of the Historical Association’s Secondary Committee and a EuroClio Ambassador); Rosie Dawson (Freelance religion journalist, documentary maker and radio producer); David Porter (Strategy Consultant for the Archbishop of Canterbury); Riaz Ravat (Contributor to the Commission on Islam in the UK, Prime Minister’s Extremism Task Force and the Commission on Religion & Belief in Public Life). Here, there was enthusiasm for the approach, and particularly how it might provide spaces for young people to talk with each other about potentially difficult or controversial issues in constructive ways. There were also challenges. How can we help ‘time poor’ teachers, for example of History and RE, to incorporate Docutubes into their curriculum? Given that negative views about religious diversity often begin in the home, are there ways in which Docutubes could equip teachers and young people to challenge stereotypes and generalisations which might learned from parents and family?

The OU team (including Katelin Teller) plan to continue to develop and expand the use of the Docutubes methodology, and this event enabled us both to raise awareness and see new potentialities. We are grateful to all the participants for their contributions.

Watch this space! And in the meantime, for more information on the Docutubes approach, see this OU Badged Open Course.

Democracy, Information, and Religion

By Paul-François Tremlett

On the 17-18th January this year, academics, activists, journalists, religious, policy makers and artists assembled at Burlington House in London (see photograph) for a series of trans-disciplinary talks and activities to address the role of religious institutions and religious communities both in the generation and dissemination of disinformation but also in the cultivation of information literacy to resist information manipulation. The event was organised by Dr Paul-François Tremlett (Religious Studies) and Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody (POLIS) and was funded by the Open Societal Challenges initiative at the Open University (see Democracy, Information, and the cultural capital of Religion: Sharing Global Best Practice on Press and Election Manipulation (open.ac.uk)). Their respective expertise in the Philippines and Russia – countries where powerful religious institutions have promoted disinformational and anti-disinformational narratives – was the catalyst for the event, which sought to analyse shifting and multi-layered contexts including a neoliberal frame that pervades contemporary economic and political discourses where the financialization of everything means big profits for those creating and dissemating disinformation, huge dissatisfaction with ruling elites across the global South and global North accompanied by a rise in populist and divisive politics, and widespread disengagement from traditional forms of political participation as governments appear increasingly distant from and unresponsive to the populations they are supposed to serve.

In such fractious times disinformation, conspiracy theories and dissension can feel like the means to “stick it to the man”. Indeed, they offer forms of political and discursive participation albeit ones grounded in a constellation of affects from anger to vexatiousness (among others) that signal a breakdown of trust in once hallowed and taken-for-granted institutions, political and cultural traditions and social memories. Bringing religion – often a synecdoche for stability, morality, tradition and trust – into the conversation about democracy and disinformation, means that we can start to explore the involvement of religious institutions and communities in spreading and/or contesting disinformational narratives, but also work to refine our theoretical and methodological tools to study the entanglements of the information and disinformation-scapes of religion and democracy.

When it comes to information, of course, there is no passage to a neutral language or medium that can be detached from politics, history or passion or indeed from situated reception and interpretation. We know that what we’re talking about is power; networks of alliances and forces which the political strategist Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, characterised as “unstable equilibria”. Solving the problems around democracy, information, election manipulation and religion cannot be done by fact-checking or media, political and religious literacy training alone, as much as such initiatives help. Rather, the interventions we design must make the most of those “unstable equilibria” to find new centres of gravity around the commons and the public good. We’re hopeful that through our event and the interactions and collaborations it has set in motion, we will develop new initiatives to tackle what’s rapidly emerging as a key challenge of our time.