A new model of distilling religion: culturalization as marginality

ABSTRACT

The culturalization of religion has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years as a compelling restatement of religion in the secular public sphere. Existing research has focused primarily on Western contexts where Christianity, as the dominant religion, is relabelled as culture in order to sanction its continued presence in the secular and multi-religious public sphere. Building on the treatment of non-majority religions in postcolonial contexts, particularly in contemporary Ghana, the article proposes a second model of culturalization in which non-dominant religions undergo culturalization as a sign of marginalisation, restriction, and exclusion. The model of culturalization adopted, the article argues, is determined by the presumed compatibility of the given religious tradition with a specific understanding of ‘modernity’. Looking at culturalization as a form of marginality adds much-needed regional and thematic breadth to the ongoing discussion, as it allows for moving beyond the mostly Western Christian framework to include post-colonial and post-imperial contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Culturalization of religion
• culture
• indigenous religions
• non-majority religions
• Christianity
• Ghana

Introduction

On 21 September 2021, a Ghanaian online news agency reported on the performance of puberty rites in the village of Ekumfi Abor in the country’s Central District (Anon 2021). ‘Ekumfi Abor Displays Rich Culture Blend with Modernity’, the title declared with a patent sense of pride. The opening paragraph reiterated the accolade: ‘There was a blend of tradition and modernity during the performance, in a way that seeks to maintain traditions that remain relevant in today’s modern society and cultural setup’. The news article is suggestive on several levels. First, it outlines puberty rites, long understood as a significant attribute of indigenous religiosity and lifeworld, in terms of ‘cultural’ or ‘traditional’ display, markedly downplaying or even ignoring the religious dimensions. Second, the language and mood of the article perpetuate the tension between ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’ and modernity that is representative of the discourse on the culturalization of religion. In Ghanaian state and popular discourses, indigenous religious practices are only proclaimed modern if they are framed as culture, since any association with indigenous religiosity is often seen as a sign of obsolescence. In fact, it is the alleged incompatibility of indigenous religions with modernity, also foregrounded by Christian actors, that serves as the incentive for the culturalization of the former. As the language of the news article suggests, neither is the culturalized indigenous religion a natural pretender to modernity. On the contrary, the synergy of ‘modern society and cultural setup’ is presented as an accomplishment and thus not a natural state of affairs.

In recent years, the culturalization of religion, that is, the pronouncement of religious forms as culture, has been studied as a significant restatement of religion in modern, multifaith, and secular settings. The most commonly investigated topic in the existing scholarship on the subject is Western Christianity and its gradual adjustment to the ‘disembeddedness’ of religion in Western secular settings (Taylor 2007). In the face of growing resistance to the involvement of religious actors in the secular public sphere, scholarship on the subject conceptualises culturalization as a modern regime of ‘invaluating’ Christianity (Bendix 2021). In this framework, culturalization, often articulated as heritagization, is an instrument for turning Christianity into a cultural resource for societies that aspire to be secular yet insist on preserving an almost transcendental sense of tradition.

This article brings the above model of culturalization into dialogue with a lesser-known model. The latter is primarily associated with non-majority and non-dominant religions and is most pronounced in postcolonial contexts, adding the much-needed regional and thematic breadth to the ongoing discussion. Drawing on my research in Ghana and other scholarship on the subject, I challenge the two defining features of the dominant model. First, I interrogate the claim that the culturalization of religion is only symptomatic of contemporary secular nation-states (Hervieu-Léger 2006, Mouritsen 2006, Zubrzycki 2012), arguing instead for a longer historical lens. Second, I maintain that while often a marker of privilege, culturalization of religion can also signal marginalisation, discrimination, and denial of the status of religion in the public sphere.

Whether culturalization is a badge of privilege or marginalisation depends largely on the discursively established compatibility of Western modernity with the religion in question, both in its culturalized and non-culturalized forms. The degree of compatibility derives from the redundant yet persistent image of a modern religion, which in turn is informed by the ideals of individualism and autonomy foregrounded by the Protestant Reformation. In this reading, religion is a voluntary, private, individual, textual, and belief-based enterprise, as opposed to the coercive, communal, oral, and material religion (Sullivan 2005, pp. 7–8). In contemporary European politics, Western Christianity, especially Protestantism, is the quintessence of this kind of religiosity and the springboard for a secular future in which religion burrows in the private sphere or disappears altogether. As Christianity as religion – that is, ritual, doctrine, and institutional framework, – moves to the background, Christianity as cultural and civilizational identity is actively embraced. In contrast, the primary motivation behind the culturalization of marginal religions is not to preserve their secularised presence in the public sphere, but rather to draw attention to their deficiency as religions.

In what follows, I begin by defining the term culturalization as it is used in this article. I am primarily interested in instrumentalized culturalization, that is, the public representation of religion as culture in order to gain access to a range of resources. I then explain how the model of culturalization as a sign of marginalisation, restriction, and exclusion challenges the two defining features of culturalization as a marker of privilege. Finally, I explore how the two models of culturalization are contingent on the relationship between religion and modernity as affirmed in public discourse.

Culturalization of religion defined

Scholarship on the subject of culturalization has not been systematic or comprehensive. The existing terminology has also been inconsistent in making sense of different on-the-ground scenarios. Even so, the variety of terms used by scholars – e.g. ‘ethnic religion’ (Hervieu-Léger 2006), ‘embedded religion’ (Martin 2005), ‘cultural religion’ (Demerath 2000), and ‘heritage religion’ (Burchardt 2020), denote phenomena that populate the space between what are commonly recognised as religion and culture, or their alternatives, heritage and tradition.

My choice of the term culturalization over the equally well-established term heritagization reflects the more comprehensive historical approach I am taking. Even if the two are entangled, culturalization is more permissive of transcending the twentieth-century state-led heritage discourse to include colonial missionary ventures to restate religion. Besides, the term heritagization is simply not suitable for certain socio-cultural contexts due to its implicit conceptual undercurrents or the fact that heritagization of religious sites or practices in the traditional sense is not relevant to all religious traditions. In the Ghanaian context, for example, the term heritage is most commonly used in both the vernacular and the official language to refer to the so-called diaspora or heritage tourism. Geared towards African-Americans who come to West Africa to learn about prominent sites of the transatlantic slave trade and to reconnect with their past, the rapidly growing industry has been fuelled by state resources since the 1980s. When it comes to state-curated public representations of indigenous religions, however, the latter are normally framed as culture rather than heritage.¹

The culturalization of religion need not mean its desacralization, although it often does. It can also mean a dual process of secularisation and subsequent sacralization of religious practices, ideas, and symbols into totems of the nation-state. In this sense, there is an overlap between state-managed culturalized religion and ‘civil religion’ (Bellah 1967), as the latter could build on culturalized or desacralized ideologies and symbols previously associated with religion.

In their much-needed effort to systematize the study of ‘culturalized religion’, Astor and Mayrl (2020) distinguish three most commonly addressed modalities, along with the associated practices and processes. They designate these modalities as ‘pragmatic culture’, ‘constituted culture’, and ‘culture as identity’. The latter refers to culturalized religion as a publicly enunciated personal or communal identity that does not demand active belief or participation in religious activities. Scholars who interrogate this modality are interested in the affective politics of belonging, or how religious belonging, stripped down to collective reflexes, can generate a sense of community in a pluralistic environment (Demerath 2000, Hervieu-Léger 2006). Often discussed within the framework of classical secularisation theory, this modality is seen as the final stage of religious secularisation in the West as it marks the distillation or refinement of religion into culture (Demerath 2000, p. 136). ‘Constituted culture’ captures the implicit, almost unrecognisable embeddedness of religion in the cultural fabric of a nation-state (Bailey 2010, Laniel 2018). To use David Martin’s words (2005, p. 76), ‘deposits of faith’ are sedimented into ‘specific angles of vision, specific modes of human association, and in sacred places specifically shaped and informed by the gestures, images, and exclamations of worship’. Astor and Mayrl maintain that constituted culture can be inscribed in the political and legal architecture of a given nation-state, determining the religious flavour of individual secularities. Such embeddedness explains the Christocentric tendencies of European secularity (Asad 2003, Taylor 2007, Hurd 2015) propagated outside of the continent via colonial pathways (Cady and Hurd 2010, Leatt 2017, Goshadze 2019).

In the two modalities considered above, the culturalization of religion is a fairly natural process that involves little to no deliberate manoeuvering on the part of the actors involved. In contrast, the focus of this article is on the intended public representation of religion as culture with the goal of navigating the secular public sphere and granting or restricting access to tangible and symbolic resources within the boundaries of a nation-state (Burchardt 2020). Astor and Mayrl designate this modality as ‘pragmatic culture’, or simply put, as cultural representation of religion that serves a specific practical purpose. Under these conditions, religion is discursively framed as culture although it may, but need not, retain the visual, behavioural, and symbolic content traditionally associated with religion. ‘Constituted culture’ and ‘culture as identity’ can serve as resources for ‘pragmatic culture’ since culturalized identity, imprints of religion in legal frameworks, and systems of symbolic meanings, such as holidays or constitutional preambles, can be effectively instrumentalized by political actors. ‘Pragmatic culture’ is contained in what Rodney Harrison (2013) calls ‘official heritage’, defined as a set of practices of both religious and non-religious nature, that are sanctioned by the state. As such, this framing of religion abounds in discourses about the nation and its heritage, is aesthetically and semantically reinforced by cultural institutions, and is legally codified and politically institutionalised in power relations (Burchardt 2020, p. 25).

The discourses and practices that accompany the instrumentalization of culture are dynamic and flexible, they wax and wane in response to the salience of various stimuli associated with the protection and/or reinforcement of national identity. Although the culturalization of religion is typically state-led, it is ultimately bidirectional, as it can also include ‘culturalizations from below’ or what I call self-culturalization. Self-culturalization refers to the reconceptualization and reimagining of religious traditions by the practitioners who create additional layers of meaning for their own cultural and political self-expression in order to secure various forms of capital. Instrumentality is central to this form of culturalization, as it constitutes an active redefinition of culture for the sake of concrete political ends. Since the intricacies of redefinition represent the primary point of interest, I focus on ‘culturalization’ as a process rather than its end product, ‘culturalized religion’.

Two models of culturalization

As discussed in the introduction, the prominent paradigm in the study of the culturalization of religion is modelled after Christianity in contemporary Western contexts. While there has been sporadic interest in the culturalization of minority religions across borders (e.g. Kurien 2007, Sansi 2007), the strong regional focus on Europe and North America has produced the two defining features of this paradigm: first, the argument that the culturalization of religious forms is indicative of advanced secularisation as it accompanies situations of enhanced plurality (Hervieu-Léger 2006, Mouritsen 2006, Zubrzycki 2012); and second, the contention that culturalization is a means of legitimating the institutional, symbolic, and ceremonial privileges of dominant religious traditions in secular and pluralistic settings (Astor et al. 2017, Joppke 2018). This article challenges the two presumptions – culturalization as a sign of advanced secularisation and culturalization as a symptom of privilege – by shifting the focus to the culturalization of non-majority and non-dominant religions.

Culturalization as indicative of advanced secularisation

Let us first address the contention that the culturalization of religion is symptomatic of highly secular settings that facilitate the objectification of religion and its differentiation from other social domains (Astor and Mayrl 2020, p. 212, Burchardt 2020, p. 3). Much of the existing scholarship highlights two stimuli for culturalization in particular: the pressures that arise in secular nation-states to remove religion from the public sphere, and the increased need to accommodate and reinforce religious pluralism, especially in times of significant sociopolitical shifts (Zubrzycki 2012, Astor et al. 2017). Both stimuli are conditioned by constitutional constraints on religion and a collective determination to legitimize the ongoing presence and leverage of the majority religion in the public sphere. Working in tandem with the established societal expectations and norms, the high courts accept and encourage the culturalization of religion in order to resolve the tension between religious presence and ideals of secularity and neutrality (Joppke 2018, Astor and Mayrl 2020). In Quebec, Catholicism is being revitalised as a secular ‘cultural heritage’ in order to resolve the ‘crisis of pluralism’ inflamed by the presence of religious others and to reaffirm the dominance of the ‘original’ Quebecois (Zubrzycki 2012, p. 444). In the same vein, far-right parties in Western Europe, whether in Denmark, the Netherlands or France, mobilise the notion of a culturally Christian Europe to assuage the perceived threat of Muslim immigration (Joppke 2018, Niklasson and Holleland 2018). The resolve to preserve national identity necessitates safeguarding Christianity, at least in its culturalized rendition, as it is judged in Western state discourse to be instrumental in upholding liberal democracy and pluralism.

The presumed association between culturalization and the processes of religious pluralism and secularisation leads to the conclusion that culturalization is a relatively recent development. However, by broadening the purview beyond Europe, the United States, and Canada, and by shifting the focus away from Christianity and majority religions more broadly, we can observe deeper historical roots of the culturalization of religion. Earlier forms of culturalization are deeply entrenched in what Timothy Fitzgerald (2007, p. 113) designates as discourses of civility and barbarity conspicuous in the nineteenth and twentieth century colonial, missionary, and nation-building processes and innately concerned with the nature of modernity. This is especially true in postcolonial settings, where the pronouncement of certain peoples, their practices, and beliefs as inferior through claims of irrationality and superstition served as a prevalent means of establishing authority.

In West Africa, the culturalization of indigenous religions resulted from two overlapping yet distinct discourses of civility and barbarity – those of colonialism and Christianity. In the former, civilisation, broadly defined, was the domain of Europeans, to which the colonised peoples had no access. In the latter, missionary and colonial claims of civility and barbarity, and the associated notions of rationality and irrationality, intersected with the post-Enlightenment profile of Christianity, fuelled by active Protestant evangelisation in the region. Christianity as a textual, believed, private, and individual religion occupied the top of the religious pyramid in which indigenous religions – as oral, enacted, public, and communal – were at the bottom. Often intertwined to the point of inseparability, the two discourses fed and reinforced each other.

In Ghana, the tension between the concept of modernity and indigenous religions, and the accompanying tendency to reframe indigenous lifeworlds as culture, dates back to the discourse of civility and barbarity introduced by the missionaries. Pronounced as rudimentary forms of world perception in contrast to Christianity, indigenous religions became more serviceable in the form of culture or tradition. In her investigation of the intricacies of culture as a concept, Cati Coe (2005, p. 30) alleges that Basel missionaries to the Gold Coast played a key role in romanticising de-sacralized or de-religionized culture as part of a national identity. The idea was inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder’s notion of the Volksgeist, or ‘the spirit of the people’, different philosophical renditions of which were fundamental to the formation of ‘imagined communities’ in the era of the nation-state. The sentiment reappeared with force in the mid-twentieth-century projects of cultural nationalism and Pan-Africanism. A renewed focus on African ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, conceptualised in terms of African lifeworlds that were difficult to disentangle from religiosity, came to be seen as a decolonial means of marching into modernity. Prominent pan-Africanist leaders of the newly established nation-states – Leopold Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah – believed that the dehumanisation of African culture was a pernicious psychological dimension of colonialism that had to be remedied through the promotion and restoration of indigenous forms of cultural expression. The conceptualisation of African lifeworld as culture was intimately intertwined with what we might understand as religion. In putting this ideology into practice, however, African leaders often relied on the selective revival of ‘cultural’ elements via systematization, classification, and objectification, methods comparable to those utilised by foreign missionaries and African Christians.

Cultural programming also played a key role in Ghana’s nation-building project. The National Commission on Culture (formerly the Arts Council), established by Kwame Nkrumah, was in the vanguard of research and teaching on ‘African culture’. Active in promoting the notion of culture as a lifeline to the past, the National Commission on Culture was primarily concerned with culture as a form of national spectacle. Indigenous religious practices were also routinely crammed into the category. Kwame Nkrumah himself was often criticised for ripping out disjointed practices and symbolic markers from communities across the country for ostentatious national displays, be it festivals, dance, or music. He is known to pour libations and recite prayers at national events, and to appear with a white handkerchief, horsetail, and walking stick to emulate the authority of traditional priests (Botwe-Asamoah 2005). In the course of Nkrumah’s cultural policy, drumming and dancing, torn out from their religious frames, came to constitute the dominant meaning of the word ‘culture’ in Ghana (Coe 2005, p. 82).

The one-dimensional representation of culture that flourished on a de-spiritualized and depoliticised version of indigenous religions has been maintained to this day, with minor interruptions and adjustments. Perhaps the best recent example of effortless meddling with indigenous religious practices is the initiative launched by the Ghanaian state since 2014, which seeks to ‘modernize’ and ‘popularize’ Hɔmɔwɔ, a prominent harvest festival of the Ga people in Accra. This is done by merging Hɔmɔwɔ with smaller festivals of the Ga-Adangbe people and by minting a new event called Homofest. The title is a word play on the Hɔmɔwɔ festival and its satellite celebrations, and the attempt to ‘homogenize’ them for collective consumption. The National Commission on Culture is at the helm of organisational matters for Homofest. While the organisers value the essence of Hɔmɔwɔ, they believe that the Ga community would benefit from a unified central celebration since traditionally the festival is observed within individual communities. Further, they believe that the standard rendition of the festival already integrates religious elements, making it unnecessary to emphasise them in Homofest. Thus, the impetus behind the initiative is not to eliminate religion from the public sphere as incompatible with advanced stages of secularisation, as is typical of the first model. If anything, the prominent public role of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity in Ghanaian political circles is a testament to an open appreciation of public religion. Rather, the organisers of Homofest are animated by the conviction that indigenous religion is far more entertaining, financially profitable, and socially beneficial when presented as culture. Apart from the anticipation that the new version of the festival will contribute to resolving intercommunal disagreements and tensions, public officials involved in the planning of the event hope that the rebranded Hɔmɔwɔ will attract domestic and international tourists. Indeed, Homofest offers a plethora of ‘cultural’ attractions, including parades, community clean-up efforts, food markets, cooking contexts, talks, and beauty pageants.

Interestingly, even as Homofest diverts attention away from Hɔmɔwɔ, especially in terms of attendance and youth interest, prominent members of the Ga community are not opposed to the event. For the majority, it is yet another occasion to celebrate together as a group. Besides, the Homofest occurs with the approval of the Ga-Adangbe chiefs, who are attracted by the prospects of material income, business development, and investment.

Culturalization as a sign of privilege

The second critical feature of existing scholarship on the culturalization of religion is the claim that it serves to endorse and maintain majority hegemony. As argued above, this prevailing paradigm is informed by the redefinition of Christianity, or the broader mythologised notion of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in mostly Western contexts.²

Within this approach, several areas of inquiry have been particularly popular. Outside of the discourse of the nation, a well-established lens for exploring this mode of culturalization is through the wealth of court cases that chronicle the volatile frontier between religion and culture (Sullivan 2005, Beaman 2013, Joppke 2015, 2018). By far the most widely discussed case study is the 2011 Lautsi II ruling, which declared a crucifix hanging in a classroom in Italy to be cultural heritage and therefore, not in contravention of the students’ right to religious freedom. In a similar adjudication across the ocean, the Quebec National Assembly voted unanimously that the presence of a crucifix and a sacred heart statue in the municipal council contributed to the celebration of Quebecois culture and heritage (Beaman 2013). No less edifying is the United States Supreme Court’s 2005 decision to safeguard the Ten Commandments monolith outside the Texas State Capitol on the grounds that its secular historical value outweighed its religious significance (Joppke 2018). Equally important are the cultural dimensions of the reframing that takes place in relation to national memory and material patrimony. This may involve the transformation of churches into culturally relevant sites (Harding 2018), the musealization of objects from defunct Roman Catholic churches (Cuperus 2019), or the representation of the crucifix as a ‘passive cultural symbol’ devoid of its indoctrinating and proselytising power (Joppke 2015).

Clearly defining the contours of culturalization as a sign of marginalisation allows us to better observe the often overlooked implications of reframing minority religion as culture. If the culturalization of majority religions in legal terms signals their power to continue to populate the secular public sphere, the representation of non-dominant practices as culture often denies them the legal protections and privileges accorded to ‘religions’. The judicial doctrine of non-entanglement obliges secular states to remain neutral in matters of religion and to refrain from interfering with religious practices unless they violate human rights principles. The same consideration is not given to systems of culture. In the African context, the double standard of culturalization is evident in the fact that the same practices are often interpreted as either religious or cultural, depending on the community in which they are performed. For instance, circumcision and marriage, duly recognised as religious rites in the context of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, are described as cultural events in the case of traditional religions (Amoah and Bennett 2008, p. 359). The cultural status often means that practices that fall under this umbrella are more easily targeted for alteration, revision, or even elimination. In many African countries, the divide between Christianity and Islam on the one hand and indigenous religions on the other is compounded by the consignment of the latter to the domain of customary law. While customary law is officially subsumed under state law, the sheer fact that matters associated with indigenous religions are discussed in the customary framework means that they are often treated less seriously, especially in Christocentric political environments such as Ghana, where religious piety is not only tolerated but also celebrated.

Both modes of culturalization are often accompanied by a simultaneous religionization and politicisation of other religion(s) present within the same national space. In the Western context, the framing of majority practices, beliefs, and aesthetics as culture runs parallel to an emphasis on the religious character of minority practices, beliefs, and aesthetics (Martínez-Ariño 2021, p. 88). In West Africa, by contrast, the systematic culturalization of indigenous religiosity has historically coincided with the religionization of Christianity and Islam.

In Europe, the instrumental culturalization of Christianity has intensified in response to the presence of Muslim migrants and the related collective effort to revitalise national, and more comprehensively European, identity. The culturalization of Christian churches, holidays, or symbols occurs alongside the politicisation of Muslim headwear, ritual slaughter, or the call to prayer as irrevocably religious and incompatible with secular principles, which in turn serves as a pretext for excluding the latter from the public sphere (Joppke 2015). The politicisation of Islam, coupled with the pluralistic pressures of political correctness, has also been a significant factor in the culturalization of Judaism, albeit in the guise of the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’. Critics argue that the increased emphasis on the Judeo-Christian heritage in recent years is at best a proxy for an imagined conglomeration of humanist and Enlightenment values, and at worst an all-too-transparent manoeuver to accentuate the incompatibility of Islam with the idea of Europe (Schreiner 2012, Kluveld 2016). The long history of anti-Jewish polemics and the struggles of Christian Europe to define itself against Judaism attest to the fiction of Judeo-Christian Europe.

In Christian postcolonial Africa, early missionary discourses on civility and barbarity, compounded by Pentecostal/Charismatic hostility to all things indigenous, have repeatedly produced an image of indigenous non-religion or false religion in the face of the ‘true faith’. Nevertheless, parallel processes of culturalization and religionization are often circumstantial rather than absolute and mutually exclusive. In Ghana, for example, efforts to represent key features of indigenous religious lifeworlds as culture are accompanied by an emphasis on the latter as one of the country’s three religions in certain discursive contexts, namely when speaking of Ghana as a multi-faith secular society.

Importantly, the intended neutralisation of religion via culturalization is not always successful or homogeneous. Since the benefits of culturalization are not technically limited to majority religions, representatives of minority religions can also capitalise on the rhetoric of culture to divert attention from their religious practices and beliefs, thus enabling their entry into the public sphere (Beaman 2013, Astor et al. 2017). Moreover, in the process of performing religion as culture, identities and relationships are continually negotiated, which can involve both affirmation and rejection of the existing order (Guss 2000). Corpus Christi in Peru is an excellent example of how a festival can become a battleground of local, national, and elite representations. Initially a nationalised and Christianised indigenous festivity, the holiday was reappropriated by practitioners as Qoyllur Rit’I and rebranded as the greatest expression of indigenous Peruvian religion (Cahill 1996).

In some cases, the cultural label is deliberately adopted by minority religious actors in order to secure recognition or funding in the purportedly neutral secular arena. In parts of France, for instance, Muslim places of worship have received government funding under the guise of cultural centres because the strict policy of non-involvement dictated by the French laïcité complicates the allocation of resources to religious institutions (Martínez-Ariño 2021, p. 89). In her work on how Hindu Americans navigate the American public sphere, Prema A. Kurien (2007, p. 197) observes a tendency among young Hindus to pronounce Hinduism not as a ‘religion’ but as a ‘way of life’, foregrounding its tolerant and pluralistic nature. Blurring the boundaries of ‘religion’ is intended to safeguard a proper place for American Hindus in the United States, where the status of truly legitimate religiosity is reserved for Christianity. Ostensibly, instances of self-culturalization by representatives of minority religions are usually set in motion by the original culturalization intended to preserve and enhance the status of the majority religion. Moreover, culturalization is not always possible or desirable for minority religious actors, as they may not be inclined to reinvent their practices and symbols in cultural terms, especially since the model framework for what is proper culture is also defined by the majority. Besides, minority religious groups have little political and social capacity to reconstruct their religious practices and symbols on a national scale since the undertaking requires significant public leverage. Even if successful, the culturalization of a minority religion can obstruct access to the legal protection that religious entities are entitled to under the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion.

A significant commonality between the two models is the popularisation of culturalized religious forms. The state’s appropriation of religious symbols and practices and their amplification from a narrow communal to a national scale involves the reduction of an array of meanings and images into a set of easily understood ideas and practices. Consequently, the religious tradition in question becomes subject to popular consumption. The Charismatization of drumming, and non-Christian devotional music more broadly, in African and African diaspora contexts is a vivid example of this trend. In Ghana and Nigeria, for instance, drumming was once strictly prohibited in early evangelical churches as an extension, if not the essence, of African religious practice. Active cultural programming in the mid-twentieth century and efforts to make drumming and dancing into a public spectacle allowed them to enter the Christian scene and gradually become an integral part of Pentecostal/Charismatic practice at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across the ocean, in Brazil, similar processes of culturalization have qualified Afro-Brazilian carnaval music to enter the Pentecostal/Charismatic repertoire. Martijn Oosterbaan (2021) observes how the samba-enredo music, commonly associated with Afro-Brazilian religious powers and long condemned as demonic by Evangelical church leaders, is being reinterpreted in light of the state-led culturalization of Afro-Brazilian practices. Contrary to, or perhaps in response to, the belief of Afro-Brazilian religious groups that samba-enredo is replete with spiritual power, Evangelical carnaval groups engage in what Oosterbaan (2021, p. 327) calls ‘religious profanation’ as they relabel samba-enredo music in terms of ‘cultural’ performance.

Culturalization and the question of modernity

The two models of the culturalization of religion – as a sign of either marginalisation or privilege – epitomise two distinct relationships between the religion in question and modernity as ascribed within the framework of the majority discourse. In cases where culturalization signals privilege, there is an understanding that the religion in question is modern enough to complement the secular order. Culturalization, in this case, affects a set of practices and beliefs that are recognised as religious and only subsequently de-religionized, while maintaining an emphasis on their civilizational value (Brubaker 2017). It is through this process that culturalized Christianity emerges as a universal reference point, an emblem of ‘fundamental social values like liberty and equality’ (Beaman 2013, p. 91).

Christianity, of course, is not the only majority religion that undergoes culturalization as a sign of its privilege. By analogy, we can examine culturalized Shinto as a public non-religion, an emblem of the intimate relationship between the Japanese state and the Shinto establishment throughout history. These two examples share important similarities. To begin with, the culturalization of the majority religion takes place against the backdrop of a pervasive secular mood in the public sphere. Besides, the respective popular discourses recognise both Shinto and Christianity as religions of ‘modernity’, albeit in distinctive terms. In Japan, religion in its traditional form has been undergoing declining popularity among the general population and has been constrained by the limitations of legal secularism. These conditions drive Japanese religious actors to reframe their practices as culture, heritage, tradition, or spirituality in order to attract more adherents, free themselves from legal restrictions, and raise funds from corporate and government sponsors (Rots and Teeuwen 2017, p. 3). What makes such culturalization efforts successful in the case of Shinto is the simultaneous initiative of the Japanese state to celebrate its status as a national ritual system. This endorsement of cultural Shinto is largely contingent on its association with ‘modernity’, which differs from the Protestant-influenced notion of ‘modernity’ discussed earlier, but functions in a similar way when it comes to culturalization. If the modernity of Christianity stems from its alleged status as the most advanced and progressive form of religiosity, the modernity of Shinto derives from its clear demarcation as a political institution rather than a religion. Joseph Josephson (2012) argues that the category of religion in Japan emerged from a dialectical negation of ideological formations that he collectively calls ‘Shinto secular’. The Shinto-scientific ideology that emerged during the Meiji state was conceptualised in contrast to Shinto ‘religions’ and included strictly public ceremonies, teachings, and duties (Josephson 2012, p. 133). The communal and non-religious Shinto ritual system stood in contrast with a religionized vision of private and faith-based Buddhism. Shinto continues to be discursively secularised in contemporary Japan as a fundamentally public and collective ritual system that belongs in the heart of the public sphere, as opposed to the ‘contaminated’ category of religion (Rots 2017, p. 185, 190).

Culturalization as a sign of marginalisation, restriction, and exclusion, on the other hand, occurs in settings where the category of religion is far from being contaminated. On the contrary, culturalization here indicates that the religious system in question is not worthy of the status of religion and must be relegated to a lesser category of culture. As already suggested, this approach echoes the colonial and missionary placement of Christianity at the top of the hierarchy as a superior form of religiosity destined to replace marginal religions. This tension between indigenous religiosity and modernity is maintained in Christocentric postcolonial settings. The discursive reframing of non-majority practices and symbols as culture unfastens them from real time as relics of the past and neutralises their influence. Ultimately, the elimination of outdated and anti-modern religious matter from the public sphere is intended to ensure a comfortable transition to modernity. Even as the first mode of culturalization represents a promotion and the second a demotion of the religion in question, both transformations seek to produce an increased compatibility with modernity.

The two main understandings of culture in contemporary Ghanaian public discourse reflect the aforementioned tension with modernity. On the one hand, there is the official state narrative in which culture represents a lifeline to the past that should be preserved and passed on to future generations. It is largely in this form – through chieftaincy, drumming, dancing, and festivals – that indigenous religiosity is represented in official state policy. The culture as tradition model, together with its indigenous religion as culture constituent, entails constant efforts to refine and polish obsolete practices and beliefs so as to render them harmless to modern Ghana (Steegstra 2005, pp. 312–313). The second interpretation of culture is an extension of the Christian discourse on civility and barbarity. It has gathered momentum amidst the growing Pentecostal/Charismatic influence on Ghanaian public life, especially its hostility to all things ‘traditional’. Recognised as the successor to indigenous religions, culture in this rendition is seen not only as the realm of the devil, but also as incompatible with the spiritual and civilizational aspirations of the Ghanaian people. Naturally, the demonisation of culture as an effigy of indigenous lifeworlds translates into the Pentecostal/Charismatic antagonism towards the government’s cultural policies. In turn, the metaphors of refinement and polishing so vividly pronounced in the state-promulgated notion of culture as tradition speak to the negative Christian rhetoric.

Conclusion

There is a tendency in recent scholarship on the culturalization of religion to discuss the phenomenon as a symptom of privilege and to connect it to religious diversification and secularisation pressures. Discourses of culturalization, it is argued, promote a restatement of the majority religion as a set of practices and values that are intrinsic to the history of the region in question and that could conceivably be stretched wide enough to accommodate other religions in the area. These coefficients are certainly critical for illuminating the intricacies of culturalized majority religions, especially Christianity. While they are no less important for shedding light on the second model of culturalization discussed in this article, my analysis suggests that they do not tell the whole story. I argue that the culturalization of non-majority religions signals their marginalisation, restriction, and exclusion and often has its origins in earlier historical processes, namely the missionary enterprise, colonial discourses of othering, and the Christocentric ordering of religions.

In Ghana, these processes have been at work with varying degrees of intensity, since the establishment of a systematic missionary presence in the region in the early nineteenth century. Motivated by a heightened enthusiasm for claiming modernity, the promotion of indigenous religion as culture gains particular momentum at historical junctures that mark nation-building projects. The goal of these endeavours is to polish the past by getting rid of outdated and, in some formulations, disgraceful religious practices, and to preserve ‘neutral’ elements, such as dances, costumes, and songs that enhance a sense of national pride. The momentum is also accelerated by the Pentecostal/Charismatic rhetoric that represents indigenous religions as demonic and offensive to contemporary Ghanaian identity.

The culturalization of non-majority religions needs to be further explored in future research, as this model expands and complicates the existing scholarship by incorporating postcolonial settings and foregrounding the question of modernity. Moving beyond the discourses of secularisation and plurality also adds more temporal depth to the inquiry since it requires reaching back into more distant pasts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Several valuable works on this topic explore the dynamics of ‘heritage politics’ in Ghana (e.g., Schramm 2004, Senah 2013), however, I suggest that the choice of ‘heritage’ over ‘culture’ in these investigations reflects the broader scholarship on heritage rather than the terminology on the ground.

2 While I speak of culturalized Christianity in ‘Western contexts’, it should be noted that the treatment of Christianity in the United States and Europe has not always been the same. The most prominent example is the Lautsi I ruling, which was initially juxtaposed against the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the display of a cross as a ‘war memorial’ (Joppke 2013, pp. 114–118). The reversal of the decision with Lautsi II, and other similar rulings in Europe in recent years, lead me to conclude that it is nevertheless possible to speak of a common model.