Is Planning ‘Secular’? Rethinking Religion, Secularism, and Planning

ABSTRACT

Responding to the call for a deeper understanding of the religious phenomenon in planning – advanced, among others, by Leonie Sandercock and June Thomas in this journal – this paper argues that understanding religion in planning entails understanding religion’s constitutive other: secularism. This position draws on the burgeoning field of secular studies as well as examples of entanglement of religion, secularism, and planning in the United States and France. It problematizes a long-held assumption that good planning is based upon the notion of ‘religious indifference,’ for the assumption is conceptually anachronistic and practically untenable. This paper offers a set of methodological considerations as to how planners can radically rethink this assumption while effectively attending to the religious subjectivities of their constituencies and actively working through the structures of the modern state. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this analysis for planning practice against the backdrop of recent improvements fostered by the American Planning Association as well as the relevance of this analysis across international contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning
• religion
• secularism
• religious (in)difference
• law and politics

Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to Bish Sanyal, who read different drafts of this paper with much care and provided me with detailed comments and invaluable advice. This paper has immensely benefited from the seminal comments provided by the four anonymous reviewers as well as the editors of the journal, Heather Campbell and Aidan While. I also wish to thank Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Faranak Miraftab, Robert Irwin, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Nicholas Kelly, Crystal Legacy, Faizan Jawed-Siddiqi, Karthik Rao-Cavale, and colleagues at MIT’s Development Studies workshop led by Jason Jackson for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Supreme Court argued that in passing the Act, Congress had surpassed its enforcement power under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

2. For instance, the fear of Islam and Muslim immigrants, especially in the wake of recent refugee crisis, was instrumental to, and instrumentalized by, the promoters of the Brexit vote in Britain. A similar issue was also obtrusively manifest in the 2016 presidential campaign period and afterwards in the United States (Marzouki, 2017), an election divided along the lines of religious traditions and of particular significance to conservative Evangelical voters.

3. The classic secularization theory emerged in the 1960s as a body of Anglophone sociological work based upon particular interpretations of the foundational sociology of Durkheim (1915) and Weber (1930).

4. In theological accounts, for example, religion always outshines secularism, whether secularism is bashed (Stark, 1999) or its presence in ‘the secular city’ is acknowledged (Cox, 1965).

5. ‘Secular studies’ is an emerging interdisciplinary field aiming to scrutinize the manifestations of the secular in modern societies. See for example (Agrama, 2012; Asad, 1993, 2003; Connolly, 1999; Mahmood, 2009, 2015; J. W. Scott, 2007; Taylor, 2007).

6. John William Gott, who led the Freethought Socialist League, is the last person imprisoned for blasphemy in Britain for his anti-Christian polemics in 1921 (Nash, 1999).

7. Consider, for instance, Israel’s new Basic Law, passed in July 2018, declaring that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Or consider the hightened ethno-religious conflicts in India provoked by the rise of Hindu nationalism as an ideology of the incumbent BJP government.

8. There is also another derivation of the concept of secular, secularization, which is a set of both descriptive and normative theories of socio-historical processes.

9. The Social Gospel was a Protestant movement aiming to address pressing social issues of the time (such as inequality, poverty, and housing) through influencing public provision policies (Calhoun, 2011).

10. Other important events include: the rise of Catholicism and the Liberation Theology in Latin America, the prominence of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, Iran’s 1979 Revolution, and the rise of religion in post-Soviet nations.

11. Religion and spirituality are not coextensive or synonymous. They refer to two different spheres of social life. For an articulate account of their difference see (Hollywood, 2010).

12. For example, G. J. Holyoake, himself an Owenist convicted for blasphemy, was the leading founder of the cooperative movement. He coined the term secularism in 1851 (Royle, 1974).

13. The secularist movement included both negative and positive views towards religion, but Owen and Holyoake were on the positive side, seeking to uncover a new system of moral truth.

14. This point has also been made in the special Interface of this journal (Sandercock, 2006).

15. For instance, welfare legislations, public provisions, hygiene systems, and local governance.

16. Faith-Based Organizations, for instance, exemplify this state-sanctioned, public role of religion.

17. Consider also recent controversies about the wearing of burqini in French cities’ beaches.

18. The First Amendment reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

19. Note that until the 1940, the First Amendment was applied only to Congress not the states.

20. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) reads, in part, “No government shall impose or implement a land use regulation in a manner that imposes a substantial burden on the religious exercise of a person, including a religious assembly or institution, unless the government demonstrates that imposition of the burden on that person, assembly, or institution (A) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (B) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

21. See, for instance, (Hays, 2002; Spain, 2001).

22. The U.S. Supreme Court in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) argued that “it may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs” (494 U.S. 872, p. 890).

23. The notion of ‘problem-space’ is introduced by the anthropologist David Scott (2004) as “an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs. That is to say, what defines this discursive context are not only the particular problems that get posed as problems as such (the problem of ‘race,’ say), but the particular questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that seem worth having” (p. 4).

24. At least, as it applies to prisoners.

25. In particular, the Planning and Law Division.

26. For instance, the EIP-23, entitled A RLUIPA Premier (APA., 2009) published by the Planning Advisory Service (PAS), APA’s flagship research brand, summarizes the theoretical, legal, and practical debates around RLUIPA.

27. This includes, for instance, the RLUIPA Reader (Giaimo & Lucero, 2009); legal lessons, news, and discussions as well as reflections from practitioners offered in the Planning Magazine and other speciality publications, such as Zoning Practice and Commissioner; and papers in the Law and Environment journal, but not in the JAPA.

28. This includes, to name a few, on-demand education and e-learning materials such as webinars, podcasts, and presentations.

29. Consider, for example, the post-9/11 push for secularization as a central tenet of regime change in the Middle East, advanced by the same group, the neo-cons, who “simultaneously sought to legitimize Christian prayer in American public schools” (Brown, 2013, p. 10).

Additional information

Funding

This paper did not receive any specific funding.

Notes on contributors

Babak Manouchehrifar

Babak Manouchehrifar is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include the comparative study of religion and (development) planning.