Religion and social action in a city of posts

Abstract

This article explores the ramifications of religious engagement in social action initiatives in ethnically and religiously plural urban environments in the UK. In particular, it explores this engagement through a series of inter-related analytical frames, which explain the trajectory and political significance of religiously inflected social action in different ways, before examining specific initiatives in localised context. Behind this approach is the recognition of the need to situate religion in complex contexts, resisting its cross-cultural and trans-historical claims, and of the ways in which religion is deployed as a specific mode of both domination and resistance. The author argues that the pluralism of the contemporary city has critical implications for understanding contemporary religion and social action, both in terms of the range of organisations involved and in terms of the negotiation of difference which is an everyday facet of multicultural urban living. The spaces of engagement opened up by these contemporary contexts allow for the development of new ways of conceptualising religion and new potentialities for the role of religion in the developing politics of living in the city.

Keywords:

• Urban religion
• religion discourse
• religious diversity
• ethnic diversity
• postcolonialism
• postsecularism
• multifaith
• British religion

Notes

1. A notable exception is an essay by Baker and Beaumont (2011), which explores religious initiatives among migrant groups in the UK’s “mongrel cities”, where “narratives of fluid, hybridized and multiple identities (including religious or spiritual ones) disrupt colonial, modernist narratives based on static, stratified and essentialised hierarchies of value” (33). Baker and Beaumont seek to pursue the idea of hybridised identities through an examination of spaces of ‘becoming’—“a new identity forged out of a number of different and sometimes competing and existing identities” (34)—alongside spaces of ‘belonging’ to specific communities, in the experience of migrant populations in the UK. The forms of ‘becoming’ that are described are, however, all geared towards engagement in contemporary structures of social living—a rather classic movement, it seems, from the outside to the inside of a ‘host’ society, that belies the initial invocation of fluidity, hybridity, and multiple identities.

2. The shopping centre finally opened, to much acclaim, in November 2015.

3. In August 2014, the unemployment rate was running at 4.5%, whereas the national average was 2.5% (see City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council 2014).

4. Forms of ‘enactment’ will be explored in further work emerging from this project.

5. All the interviewees will remain anonymous in this article. Names have been changed to preserve interviewees’ anonymity.

6. The spiritual committee is self-consciously ‘ecumenical’, consisting of one Salafi Imam, one Deobandi Imam, and one ‘Sunni Sufi’ Imam (personal interview with management committee member, 13 November 2013).

7. The theatre, built in 1913, was in fact named as a kind of orientalist tribute to the Moorish architectural wonder.