The future of religious pasts: religion and cultural heritage-making in a secular age – introduction

ABSTRACT

The question of how to symbolize collective identities in an age marked by both nationalist fervor and diversity politics has dominated public debates and highlighted the political role of religion. But what happens to religious objects, sites, and practices when they are framed as cultural heritage? What are the forces behind the ways in which religion is drawn into the dynamics around cultural heritage and heritage-making in secular societies? And why and how do some religious places become iconic sites of cultural heritage, arousing both national sentiments and global concerns? In this article, we explore the complex politics around religion and cultural heritage and scrutinize how they intersect with processes of secularization, and regimes of diversity and secularism. We argue that there is a growing tendency in contemporary societies to culturalize religion, suggesting that the framing of collective heritage is closely linked to what counts as religion and as culture in everyday life and in official discourse. We theorize this dynamic through the concept of ‘heritage religion’ and contend that it offers a distinctive material perspective on the culturalisation of religion. Drawing on Durkheim, we point out how processes of religious heritage-making produce new forms of sacredness.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious heritage
• culturalisation
• secularism
• emotions

Notre Dame on fire

Questions of how to symbolize collective identities in an age marked by both nationalist fervour and diversity politics have come to dominate public debates and have highlighted the political role of religion. But what happens to religious objects, sites and practices when they are framed as cultural heritage? What are the forces behind the ways in which religion is drawn into the dynamics around cultural heritage? How is religion transformed when its constituent parts become subject to aesthetic and artistic evaluation, and enlisted in the politics of communal, national, and civilizational belonging? The contributors to this special issue address these questions based on case studies from East Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. We illustrate what is at stake in these debate with a recent, iconic example.

On 15 April 2019, a fire broke out in the central roof section of the world-famous Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, causing the spire to collapse within a matter of hours. The cathedral, built between the 12th and 14th centuries in central Paris, is one of the city’s most iconic architectural monuments and attracts millions of tourists every year.¹ Immediately, the event became a hotly discussed topic on social media, where religious and political leaders from all over the world expressed their grief and solidarity with French citizens, as well as with the Christian world and beyond. It is no exaggeration to say that the burning of Notre Dame spawned a global affective event. As people grieved for the loss, more than four hundred firefighters sought to stop the fire, twenty of whom tried to cool the two front towers from the inside in order to prevent the collapse of the entire building, while government officials and volunteers tried to get moveable items out in a human chain. As the roof burned, people gathered in the streets in safe places as near as they could to the fire and began to chant collectively ‘Je vous salue, Marie’ (Ave Maria), like a spontaneous communion (Bacqué et al. 2019). It was not just devout Catholics who were singing, but also crowds with little or no religious convictions, who, in the atmosphere of distress and agony, realized that something of France’s identity, as well as of humanity, was in peril. According to the human geographer O’Reilley (2020, p. 75), ‘[s]hock, disbelief, strong emotions were felt often expressively bonding individuals or collective memories with this monumental place; whether concerning religion, spirituality, empathy, past personal, social or collective experiences, or conscious or subconscious histories or significant events’. Within a few days, around eight hundred million euros had been raised through donations from the entire world for the restoration of the building.

While Notre Dame’s status as a symbol of the French nation and a treasure of its cultural heritage is beyond dispute, this strong emotional response may have come as a surprise to some, as France is one of the most secular countries of the world, and its history is marked by periods of massive anticlericalism. The way these developments unfolded therefore raises a series of intriguing questions: What is the role of religion in processes of heritage-making in secular societies? Why and how do some religious places become iconic sites of cultural heritage, arousing both national sentiments and global concern? And what accounts for the fact that some of such sites remain iconic even after societies secularize and pluralize?

In his message of regret and sadness to the Cathedral’s archbishop, Pope Francis defined this church as the ‘architectural and spiritual heritage of Paris, France and humanity’ (Bulletin of the Holy See Press Office 2019). The following day, the Turkish President, Tayyip Erdoğan tweeted in French that ‘the dreadful fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral, one of the symbols of Paris and a common heritage of humanity, also deeply shocked us’, while the German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her pain ay seeing Notre Dame ablaze as ‘a symbol of France and of our European culture’. Russian President Vladimir Putin offered help to rebuild the Cathedral, stating that ‘Notre Dame is France’s historical symbol, an invaluable treasure of European and world culture, and one of Christianity’s most important shrines’. These are just a few examples of the innumerous public expressions from political and religious leaders of all spectrums, as well as ordinary people rendering homage to Notre Dame. The rhetoric of culture and heritage was all over the place. Some referred to Christian culture and heritage, while others underlined the importance of this site as one of world cultural heritage. The cathedral had already been certified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site under the title ‘Paris, banks of the Seine’, which also includes the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Place de la Concorde and other buildings of Haussmannian architecture.

Importantly, we see that while ordinary people as well as political and religious leaders of different persuasions were unified in their mourning and feelings of loss, there were divergent perceptions of what exactly was lost in the fire, and what was to be mourned: a salient place of worship that served as a material anchor of French Catholics’ collective identity? A cultural moment that indexes national belonging to the grande nation beyond religious particularities? Or an arguably unique work of art which, because of its grandeur and aesthetic design, represents a value for which people from all over the world, regardless of their religious or national affiliation, can be enthusiastic, a work whose inner perfection gives rise to its veneration? It seems as if it was precisely the lack of clarity about what was actually being mourned that made this shared mourning possible (see also De Jong 2023, p. 3).

The fire resulted in a resurgence of the complex issue of the place of religion in relation to both cultural heritage and national identity, particularly in a country like France, where laïcité, the strict separation of private religion from public civil life, is one of the founding principles of the Republic. In a nutshell, the fire at Notre Dame and the reactions to the possible loss of this iconic monument crystallize the central themes of this special issue on the politics of religious heritage, with its socio-historical, emotional, material, aesthetic and discursive aspects. What do the reactions to the fire in and beyond France tell us about the entanglements between identity, belonging, collective memory, historiography, aesthetics and affective components of citizenship? What influences do the politics of religious or cultural heritage have on collective identities and belonging? Whose heritage counts? How does the sacredness of the site for Catholics interfere with its ‘secular sacredness’ (Balkenhol et al. 2020) as part of its heritage, which is that of all humanity?

Religion, heritage-making, and secularisation

As the intensity of the politics around cultural identity is growing across the world, the notion of heritage-making, or ‘heritagisation’, has acquired new political urgency. At the same time, these politics have animated far-flung controversies over the religious and secular sources of belonging and collective identities, along with the values of ethnic, religious and racial majorities, minorities and the states that are supposed to represent them. Conflicts over religious heritage are therefore part of the broader dynamics that scholars have construed as a ‘heritage craze’ (Yan 2018) or ‘heritage buzz’ (Van de Port and Meyer 2018, p. 7). The main questions that the contributors to this special issue pursue are these: How do the historical rise of what Taylor (2007) has called ‘the secular age’ and the unfolding of ‘multiple secularities’ (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012) affect the conditions under which religious heritage is valued, authorized, and experienced? And what are the consequences of secularization and religious pluralization and its legal and political recognition for the way religious heritage is enshrined in societies across the world?

Material artefacts – monuments and architecture, as well as statues and objects – give tangible shape to otherwise abstract values, imagined histories or codes of belonging. Religious pluralism, secularization and national cultural identities are often the backdrop against which controversies over what to preserve and who is in charge of preservation emerge. For instance, sacred objects such as the amulets or beads used in religious rituals in different parts of Africa come to occupy a prominent discursive and material place within visual culture, art and fashion as part of traditional African heritage, whose contours are under constant negotiation. Material artefacts imbue these politically and economically motivated negotiations with their affective and sensorial dimensions. In a similar vein, both the religious and the non-religious often develop affective attachments to religious artefacts and architectures as heritage. Religious heritage thus invites a reconsideration of the affective and performative politics of the secular that often raises distinctions between religion-as-belief and religion-as-culture-and-heritage, which are played out differently in different parts of the world.

Public discourses that frame religion as heritage and that serve to articulate the cultural identifications of nation states and their citizens with religion in ways that are compatible with liberal modernity are becoming increasingly prevalent. Such discourses have emerged in the context of broader discussions over secularity (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012), the religious identity of the liberal state (Joppke 2015) and the politics of religious freedom (Sullivan 2005, Sullivan et al. 2015). However, while cultural studies scholars interested in religious change have explored the variety of social domains in which these changes occurred, as well as the impact of such change on public institutions (Koenig 2007), they have paid less attention to how religion itself has been reshaped in these processes. In this special issue, we pursue the idea that public discourses and practices of ‘heritage religion’ (Burchardt 2020), or religion as heritage, reveal a novel social form of religion that has emerged as a consequence of secularization, religious diversification and other processes of cultural change pertaining to identity politics.

We suggest that the politics around religious heritage is situated at the intersection of three scholarly debates in which issues related to heritage dynamics are addressed. First, the cultural-sociological study of ‘religion as heritage’ is connected in many ways to debates about ‘cultural’ or ‘culturalized’ religion (Astor and Mayrl 2020). Scholars have recognized that religion continues to have cultural meaning as an affective form of belonging even for those who do not participate in religious life, do not hold religious beliefs and view themselves as secular. This implies that the different dimensions of religion, such as belief, ritual practice and belonging, may become increasingly decoupled and are not necessarily related to one another. This is what the British sociologist Davie (1990: 2000) has captured in the notion of ‘believing without belonging’, while Hervieu-Léger (2000) drew attention to the opposite dynamic of ‘belonging without believing’. Hervieu-Léger (2005:, p. 337) argued that Christianity remains influential in the West not because of the continued power of the historical churches, but ‘because the symbolic structures they have molded conserve a remarkable power of cultural impregnation that survives the loss of official beliefs and the collapse of observances’. In contrast to notions of religion as belief and practice, concepts such as ‘culturalized religion’ (Astor and Mayrl 2020) and ‘heritage religion’ (Burchardt 2020) seek to capture the ways in which religion operates as a metonym for cultural identities and affective forms of belonging.

Second, questions of religious heritage are closely related to the transformations of the nexus between religion, nationhood and nationalism. Scholars of nationalism have shown how nations are becoming increasingly pluralized culturally through immigration and other forms of diversification. But there is now also a recognition that this powerfully bears on the ways in which national and subaltern histories are narrated in historiography, displayed in museums, celebrated through national ceremonies, and symbolically condensed in monuments and statues (Anderson’s’s 1983, İlengiz 2022). We suggest that, as religion is an integral part of migration-driven diversification, it is directly affected by the political challenges around multicultural and postcolonial nationhood. As Van den Hemel et al. (2022, p. 7) argue, ‘the return of nationalism brought along a fiery debate about the importance of the religious past for defining present-day culture.’

In scholarship on cultural heritage, there have been tendencies to construe heritage and preservation primarily in as top-down, state-driven projects in which powerful heritage bureaucracies nilly-willy, or intentially, reproduce hegemonic discourses about national identities and cultural values, fostering elitist or even supremacists notions of culture at the expense of subordinated groups and their interests. The term ‘heritage regime’ captures this perspective. Such views also resonate in De Jong’s (2023, p. 6) suggestions ‘that claims to a certain religious ‘heritage’ are entangled with claims to (the invention of) ‘secularism’ and its historical emergence in Europe, rendering the presence of Muslims in Europe problematic in terms of their adherence to a religion that presumably does not acknowledge the co-existence of the secular and the religious.’ The presumption that national and international reactions and efforts such as the reconstruction of Notre Dame are predominantly projects to exclude European Muslims might, however, overlook the multiple meanings people from diverse backgrouds attach to the building and its variegated properties as a cultural object.

To gain a more comprehensive sense of the issue, it is also important to focus on how local actors and heritage communities create cultural meaning and forge collective projects that insist on the inclusivity of heritage challenging dominant discourses. Therefore, Van den Hemel et al. (2022, pp. 7–8) are pertinent when they emphasize that ‘although it is undoubtedly the case that heritagization can further cement the power of dominant groups in a society, it can also provide platforms for subversion, by reworking what the roots of a national community are.’ In her work on Poland, for instance, Zubrzycki (2012) shows how progressive segments of the population began to revive Jewish religious traditions and mobilized discourses invoking the country’s Jewish heritage. Such discourses also serve to fashion public images of religious pluralism that threaten Catholicism’s hegemony with discourses on national identity.

Significantly, earlier understandings of heritage had been closely tied to the model of the museum, equating heritage with museums displays. By contrast, Smith (2006) construed heritage as a result of what she called ‘the authorized heritage discourse’ which is constituted in positions of power, professional knowledge and the sanctification of particular collections and practices of selection, preservation and display. But she also drew attention to forms of heritage that are situated outside museums, such as religious sites, family collections, nationalist monuments, and so on.

Scholars following in Smith’s footsteps have shown above all how heritage-making in former colonies has been shaped by Western and other imperialist world views and pretensions of racial supremacy. In sites ranging from Africa and South America to the settler colonial British dominions in North America and Australasia, heritage-making came along with the systematic devaluation of local or indigenous religions, spiritualities,the artifacts and practices they have produced. These devaluations have led to far-reaching forms of cultural erasure, epistemic violence, and hierarchical definitions of cultural value, which have often been reproduced in postcolonial periods. In a related debate, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998:, p. 149) offered a compelling critique back in 1998 of how the heritage industry (particularly tourism and museums) packages history and selectively erases events and actors that do not fit into contemporary heritage ensembles. In this special issue, Mariam Goshadze’s as well as Anindita Chakrabarti and Shriram Venkatramar’s articles discuss the complexities of regulating religious heritage in the postcolonial contexts of Ghana and India respectively.

Third, research on religious heritage has been informed by studies on material culture, material religion (Meyer 2010) and heritage studies (Bendix 2018). These studies have highlighted the ways in which artifacts and objects are selected, preserved, interpreted and displayed the historical conditions under which such practices have emerged, and the ways in which objects mediate particular cultural lineages privileging certain historiographies and collective memories at the expense of others. In a highly significant contribution, anthropologists Van de Port and Meyer (2018) have argued that the ontological status of heritage objects depends on complex practices of authentication. At the same time, they argue that there is an ‘aesthetics of persuasion’ through which heritage ‘is appropriated and embodied in lived experience’ (Van de Port and Meyer 2018, p. 6). What matters is therefore not only how heritage is constructed, but also how it comes to be perceived and experienced as genuine and authentic, as the living document of a nation, community or tradition.

With particular regard to religion, Bourdieu (1996) suggested that, once religious objects are removed from the liturgical context of religious practice, they lose their original sacred quality and are secularized (see also Rots and Teeuwen 2020). Yet other scholars (Isnart and Cerezales 2020) emphasize the continuities and similarities between religious and non-religious forms of heritage-making, e.g. preservation in museums. They argue, in contrast to Bourdieu, that the emergence of ‘heritage religion’ does not necessarily imply secularization. We draw on these debates to suggest that the idea of ‘heritage religion’ offers a distinctive material lens for questions of the culturalisation of religion and highlights how processes of religious heritage-making are closely related to secularization as well as re-sacralisation.

In fact, recent scholarly interventions such as the volumes by Van den Hemel et al. (2022) as well as De Jong and Mapril (2023) make it clear that in current practices of framing religion as heritage, secularization and sacralization are often parallel processes. A Durkheimian approach that privileges the notion of sacrality, has been especially helpful in understanding how the framing of religion as heritage does not so much diminish the role of religion but operate by shifting the location of the sacred – from organized religion to arts, collective memory sites and the nation. Along these lines, Van den Hemel et al. (2022, p. 3) note that ‘[…]heritagization also sacralizes heritage sites, objects, and practices, to the extent that heritage recognition renders them non-everyday and non-profane, to be separated from the everyday, treated with awe, and contemplated for their inherent values – what Walter Benjamin (2007 [1936], p. 221) called their ‘aura.’’

Heritage formation has usefully been construed as ‘the processes whereby, out of the sheer infinite number of things, places and practices that have been handed down from the past, a selection is made that is qualified as a precious and irreplaceable resource, essential to personal and collective identity and necessary for self-respect’’ (Lowenthal 2005, p. 81 cited in Van de Port and Meyer 2018, p. 1).

Based on this broad understanding, we suggest the notion of the ‘religious heritage assemblage’ (Burchardt 2020, p. 159) as a way of capturing the variety of values, commitments and practices on which the social construction and experience of religious heritage depends. This notion brings together three sets of practices: regulatory practices, aesthetic-performative practices, and affective practices. This means that religious heritage is (1) legally codified and institutionalized within power relations that secure, or challenge, cultural hegemonies, (2) aesthetically elaborated by cultural institutions and displays, and (3) mobilized by ordinary citizens as an affective politics of belonging. More than the concepts of ‘heritage regime’ or ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (Smith 2006), this concept highlights that, in order to be perceived and lived as such, religious heritage depends on affective ties between the object, place or ritual practice and those it is meant to metonymically embody.

A few empirical observations are helpful to illustrate the usefulness of this concept. In 2003, the question of whether and how Europe’s religious heritage, which is largely Christian, should appear as the foundation for common values and norms in the European Constitution was highly controversial. Some governments supported Poland’s insistence on anchoring this Christian heritage in the constitution’s preamble while others, especially France, emphasized the political tradition of the Enlightenment. Religious heritage as a legal concept also appears in the national constitutions of many countries (Astor et al. 2017). Such legal frames have a direct influence on the way public authorities enshrine certain aspects of religion and culture as heritage while denying others the status and value accruing from such enshrinement. For this reason, it is essential to address the way in which legal definitions of religious heritage have emerged historically. Certain places and practices considered sacred, such as temples, cemeteries, prayers and pilgrimages, are transformed into tangible and intangible national cultural heritage, sometimes receiving World Heritage status. The inclusion of float festivals in Japan, held annually to honour deities to prevent natural catastrophes, on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage is a case that drew fierce criticism from priests and traditionalists alike, while exposing the political implications of heritagisation (Rots and Teeuwen 2020). What is at stake when cultural goods are defined as religious or non-religious cultural heritage? In the latter case, heritagisation means that religious items are culturalized and thus secularized, thereby acquiring the status of secular-sacred. This raises the question of how the redesignation of cultural goods from religious-sacred to secular-sacred shapes people’s affects as they engage with them.

The main argument that this special issue pursues is that secularization changes the conditions under which religious heritage is created, recognized, regulated, afforded cultural value and produces affective attachments. This is played out through different modalities. In postcolonial nation states such as India and Ghana, the rise of secular governance implies the framing of a particular set of actors (courts of law, heritage experts, community leaders, and so on) who are acknowledged as authoritatively addressing heritage matters on behalf of the groups and traditions they represent and adjudicating them in the name of modern values such as equality, liberty and authenticity. By contrast, the agency of non-human actors, e.g. deities or spirits, remains a legally complicated and difficult problem to conceptualize (see Chakrabarti and Venkatramar in this issue).

At the same time, even as the rise of the secular age has led to the questioning of essentialist narratives around religious sites, objects and rituals and their ontological status as created by non-human, i.e. transcendental powers or gods, the secular governance of heritage is often embattled by supremacist groups seeking to advance their religious claims as exclusively truthful and superior to those of others. Hindu nationalist claims on the mosque-temple complex in Ayodhya in India (Ratnagar 2004), the Talibans’ destruction of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan, Israel’s treatment of certain archeological sites (Van de Port and Meyer 2018, p. 9), the Catholic Church’s management of Cordoba’s Mosque Cathedral (Astor et al. 2019) and the decision of the Turkish state to transform the Hagia Sofia from a secular museum into a mosque (Dreßler 2021) all speak to these dynamics. It seems that especially shared sacred sites and the objects that have constituted multireligious spaces in different historical periods are often subject to at times violent conflicts over their status as heritage (Burchardt and Giorda 2022).

The heritagisation of religion and culture

Broadly speaking, we argue that there are two distinct dynamics at play here. First, in some contexts, religious heritage is chiefly construed as the material and immaterial patrimony of historically dominant religious traditions, e.g. Catholic Christianity in southern Europe or Protestantism in North America, whilst such constructions are fostered and validated by the discursive framing of religious as national, namely as ‘our’ culture (see Beaman in this issue). This culturalisation of religion (Astor and Mayrl 2020, Beaman 2020) may be a strategic move to situate dominant traditions above all others and to free them from the constraints of the secular governance of religious heritage. The secular state’s financial support for the restoration of the Notre Dame Cathedral, as discussed in the opening of this introduction, and for the preservation of other Christian buildings in France and elsewhere illustrates this first form of the culturaliztion of religion. After all, conservationists try to circumvent the strict secular practices of religious management arguing that it is the state’s responsibility to protect all objects with outstanding aesthetic and cultural value and not to discriminate against some because they are religious.

In the second dynamic, which applies especially but not only to former imperial spaces and settler colonies, certain subaltern sacred traditions have been legally framed as culture and custom rather than as religion (Chidester 1996). This has been true, for instance, of ancestor worship in some African settings, tribal traditions in India, and indigenous spiritual practices in Canada and Australia. In such cases, the framing of certain practices as custom or culture rather than religion – the second form of the culturalisation of religion – was meant not to lift these local practices up to the status of religion but to deny them the legal, symbolic and economic privileges that such a status may entail. Such strategies have often meant the disawovel or devaluation of the religious heritage of subaltern religious groups. Significantly, however, in recent decades indigenous groups have become highly vocal in making their voices heard in debates over religious heritage, as van de Port’s work on indigenous communities in Brazil powerfully shows (Van de Port and Meyer 2018). And in doing so, they also increasingly draw upon the institutions and idioms of world heritage discourse and UNESCO. These two forms of religious heritage-making through culturalisation are aptly thematized by drawing on the examples from Europe and Ghana in Goshadze’s articles in this issue.

Thus, while in some contexts secularization aids the musealisation of religion, which seemingly freezes religious objects and their cultural meaning in time through displaying them outside the sacred universe, in others it engenders conflicts over religious heritage between different groups, potentially pacifying or reinforcing these conflicts. The latest collection of essays in the anthology by De Jong and Mapril (2023) explores these negotiations between different groups particularly within the European context. Along the same lines, even in highly secularized contexts such as Britain and Cyprus, as Simon Coleman and Evgenia Mesaritou show in their contribution to this special issue, how religious heritage can be afforded renewed sacred value. In any case, secularization changes the nexus between heritage and power by highlighting the epistemological force of the globally validated professional knowledge of the heritage bureaucracy and by feeding into political discourses around religious heritage that seek to strengthen the purchase of religious heritage on nationalism.

There has surely been a growing trend towards the institutionalization of religious heritage in the last couple of decades through state and intra-state policies, such as those of the Council of Europe or UNESCO (Tsivolas 2014). Yet, as argued thoroughly above, the heritagisation paradigm does not remain uncontested. Along with the increasing politics of heritage, not only the theoretical framework of heritage but also its critique have become very influential in the social sciences and cultural studies (Bendix et al. 2013).

Organization of the special issue

The special issue is organized into six essays, each treating one or more case studies. Some of the volume’s contributions take an empirical standpoint, examining various religious and secular traditions and practices of heritage formation, while others are more concerned with conceptual issues. Although the articles do not necessarily converge on identical approaches to cultural heritage, heritage-making, or the culturalisation of religion, they all address heritage in relation to religion and the secular within different traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and African Indigenous Religion, privileging the material, performative, spatial and affective dimensions of these processes.

We begin with Miriam Goshadze’s article, ‘The Art of Distilling Culture: Two Modes of Culturalisation of Religion’, in which she compares the different modes of culturalisation discussed above, especially in the current European and Ghanaian contexts. The article argues that the politics of culturalising religion function differently in these two distinct secular contexts. It also outlines how the rise of the narrative of Judeo-Christian identity in Europe, especially after World War II, drew upon the framework of religious heritage and served to create hierarchies among religious traditions while maintaining the privileges of majority religions. On the other hand, Goshadze emphasizes that the culturalisation of minoritarian, indigenous religions leads to the domestication of certain practices as custom and tradition in order to improve control over certain groups in Ghana in particular, but also in Africa in general.

Lori Beaman’s essay, ‘Religion to Culture: Who is the ‘Us’?’ highlights our first form of the culturalisation of Christianity in the Canadian context, using the example of the controversial court case on whether prayers should be held before the opening of municipal meetings. It argues that the law and legal provisions occupy a privileged position in the creation of religious heritage, as they set the rules by which a sacred artifact, place, or practice can be classified as religious or cultural heritage. However, legality also brings its own ambiguities, especially in terms of its transferability to everyday life practices. The article illustrates how the decision to consider religion at times as part of culture and heritage depends on the ways in which the ‘us’ is imagined and performatively enacted as Canadian nationalism, which necessarily leaves out religious practices that are deemed to be ‘them’.

Along the same lines, the article by Anindita Chakrabarti and Shriram Venkatramar also focuses on the legal constitution of the immaterial religious heritage crystallized in the example of shebaitship in Hindu legal philosophy that protects the inheritor of a God by recognizing its property rights as a legal person. The controversial case of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple discussed in the article illustrates the strategies the state deploys to transfer the religious rights of a deity – in this case Lord Vishnu, legally represented by a royal family – to a particular form of public temple. However, the transfer of private and religious property rights from kings to the state presents legal contradictions, as the religious right of shebaitship can hardly be represented within the framework of modern secular law. With deprivatisation, as part of secularization, the discourse of heritagisation emerges with the demand for the temple’s inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

In her contribution anthropologist Paulina Kolata explores the ways in which the use of new digital technologies of preservation and reproduction in heritage care affect the status of heritage objects between secular and religious spheres. In order to do so, Kolata examines the use of 3D printing and related technologies that allowed Japanese heritage experts to produce, via digital cloning as it were, an exact replica of an ancient Buddhist statue, which was to be put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. Meticulously following up on the processes that led to the use of these technologies in the realm of religious heritage-making, the motives underlying as well as on the complex agency of non-human participants in heritage-making, Kolata pinpoints the role of science in it and of the scientization of heritage. This scientization and the heritage ‘cloning’ it enabled, Kolata argues, ‘intensifies these processes of secularization and public sacralisation by enhancing the value of the ‘cloned’ replica through the process-intense technologies of reproduction.’ In addition, it further blurs the boundaries between religious and secular spheres and enhances the ambivalence on the legitimate location of heritage objects after their technological reproduction.

Mar Griera, Avi Astor and Marian Burchardt, in their article ‘Performing Heritage at Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral’ invoke the political and economic strategies for the heritagisation of religion, including the significance of UNESCO and the important role that the Catholic church (or the dominant religion) plays in those heritagisation processes by drawing on fieldwork at the site. The article focuses on the tensions between the political and affective narratives between on the one hand the building’s Islamic and multiconfessional past and on the other hand its Christian identity, manifested in its ownership, management and everyday practices. The authors argue that heritage also appears here in its first form of culturalising the majority religion, namely Catholicism, while highlighting the contemporary voices of both secular liberal publics and Muslims who criticize heritage policies that privilege the Catholic Church.

In his article ‘The Matter of Home: Repurposed Churches, Heritage and Belonging in Amsterdam’, Daan Beekers addresses the highly emotional repurposing of church buildings in the Netherlands through the case study of the Chassé Church in Amsterdam. The article addresses the heritage-making of a majority religion in a highly secularized society, while underpinning the contested status of the building itself through its material and affective repurposing. Drawing on empirical research material, the author exposes residents’ sensory and affective attachments to the church as part of their everyday practices or childhood memories, experiencing demolition and reuse as a definite loss. The heritagisation of religious culture appears as a strategy to preserve this very personal and intimate bond that gives the feeling that one is keeping a home.

Finally, drawing on two ethnographic case studies, Simon Coleman and Evgenia Mesaritou’s article ‘Possessing and Being Possessed by the Past: On the Ambivalences of Heritage as Religious Return’, aptly brings together the experiences of the Greek Orthodox in Cyprus and Roman Catholics in England. They highlight the intimate and personal practices of heritage-making in religious sites that are experienced as spiritual, cultural and material losses. The histories of war, conflict and oppression render these places of worship particularly salient in claiming heritage, thus complicating notions of belonging and home. The way in which sacred places are viewed and perceived is closely linked to the constitution of subjectivities, sometimes with homeliness and intimacy, sometimes with discomfort and unhomely feelings.

Taking together, the contributions to this special issue shed light on the multifarious and often contradictory political dynamics that underlie and are stipulated by the placement of religious objects and rituals in the field of cultural heritage. The contributions show how religious heritage objects only become what they are, by traversing the boundaries of multiple social fields – the religious field, the museum field, and the political field, to name just a few – but that they also configure these boundaries by crossing them. The politics of religious heritage-making therefore not only pinpoint the deep-running transformations of what we understand as cultural heritage in an age of secularization. They also illustrate the complex, and sometimes fraught, relationships between heritage-making itself and liberal values of equality and neutrality in the increasingly diverse and pluralized societies in our globalized world.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See also the detailed and highly illuminating discussion of this case in De Jong (2023) who focuses on questions of temporality.