Cultivating new post-secular political space

ABSTRACT

The emergence of post-secular new political space is increasingly recognised as both urgent challenge and beckoning opportunity for innovative political intervention. The concept is framed around three defining characteristics. Firstly, it refers to socio-economic space vacated by government and demarcated by extremes of poverty and marginalisation requiring mitigation by charities, faith communities and the like. Secondly, it is evidenced in local contexts by an obvious lack of social mobility and blatant discrepancies in income, educational outcomes and life expectancy. Thirdly, it is ontological space. Arguably for the first time in a generation, the deep political structures are accessible to recognition and transformation. Fourthly, it is European space exemplified by the increasing challenge to the post-war European project and the burgeoning nationalism and xenophobia exacerbated at least in part by the influx of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants. This special issue of Global Discourse assembles six articles and responses emanating from a desire to cultivate and not colonise this emerging space for overall well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Friendship
• love
• politics
• populism
• post-secularity
• well-being

This issue of Global Discourse asks how positive interventions might be made into post-secular political spaces that have emerged in the wake of the economic, political and social upheavals of the 2008 global financial crisis. The failure of liberal democracy to deal effectively with such challenges has led to scapegoating of the poor, immigrants and Muslims and contributed to the populist electoral success of, among others, the Leave campaign during the Referendum on Membership of the European Union and Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. These shocks have highlighted contemporary political spaces defined by what Chris Baker, William Temple Professor of Religion and Public Life at Goldsmiths, University of London, has termed, in personal conversation, as ‘all the posts’: postmodern, post-Christendom, post-liberal, post-political and post-secular. This issue aims to examine emerging attempts to understand and advance the cause of well-being within this context. The articles that follow address such issues as (re)configuring mythologies for the common good; deploying love and friendship politically; motivating new social movements; valuing the other; recovering displaced and devalued political narratives; finding alternatives to the previously dominant neo-liberalism; listening deeply for social transformation and overcoming adversarial party politics.

1. New political space

The concept of new political space is framed around three defining characteristics. Firstly, it refers to socio-economic space vacated by government and demarcated by extremes of poverty and marginalisation requiring mitigation by charities, faith communities and the like. Secondly, while delineating an increasingly global phenomenon, it is evidenced in local contexts by an obvious lack of social mobility and blatant discrepancies in income, educational outcomes and life expectancy. Thirdly, and more controversially, it is ontological space. Arguably for the first time in a generation, perhaps a millennium, the deep political structures are accessible to recognition and transformation. Fourthly, it is European space exemplified by the increasing challenge to the post-war European project and the burgeoning nationalism and xenophobia exacerbated at least in part by the influx of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants.

1.1. Socio-economic space

As I write, it is 10 years since the 2008 economic crisis and consequent austerity regimes exacerbated the plight of the poor, marginalised and disabled in the nations of the UK. Government statistics show that 4.1 million children are now living in relative poverty compared with four million the previous year, accounting for more than 30% of children (Poverty in the UK: Statistics. House of Commons Library, 23 April 2018). A study published by a coalition of anti-food poverty charities in the End Hunger UK blog on 30 January 2018 finds 23% of parents with children aged 18 and under skip or see someone in their household skipping a meal due to a lack of money for food. The research, which surveyed more than 2000 adults, also shows the same proportion of these adults worry about not having enough food to eat, while 13% have gone without eating for a whole day in the last 12 months. The number of recorded deaths of homeless people has more than doubled over the last 5 years. At least 78 homeless people died on the streets and in temporary accommodation this past winter, bringing the number of recorded homeless deaths to more than 300 since 2013 (McClenaghan 2018). An estimated £387m has been cut from youth service spending by local authorities in the 6 years to August 2016 (Offord 2016), while The Royal College of Psychiatrists Press Release for February 2018 showed that the income for mental health trusts was £105m lower in 2016–17 than 5 years earlier.

1.2. Local space

According to a report by the National Audit Office, one in 10 councils with social care obligations will have exhausted their reserves within the next 3 years if the current rate of expenditure continues (The Guardian, 2 March 2018). Central government finance for local authority budgets from which much of the social and community provision has come in the past have been cut by approximately 40% since 2010 (Full Fact, 29 June 2017). In many towns, parliamentary constituencies and even local council wards, there are discrepancies in life expectancy extending to more than a decade. All this is further increased in the North of England. ‘Five decades of death records tell a tale of two Englands, north and south, divided by resources and life expectancy – a profound inequality resistant to the public health interventions of successive governments’ (Buchan 2018). In 2017, the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission Start-Up Group, which I chair, commissioned a Richardson Institute Internship Report on Poverty in Morecambe Bay. This collated all the available reports and statistics and revealed that life expectancy in Morecambe compared extremely unfavourably with the life expectancy in other areas of the Bay. The life expectancy of men in Morecambe is 74 years and for women 81 years. In Kendal, 23 miles away, the life expectancy of men is 80 years, 6 years more than in Morecambe, and for women it is 83 years, 2 years more than Morecambe. Thirty per cent of the children in Morecambe are in poverty. This data correlate with both the large number of people of working age (24%) who are in poverty and the number of pensioners (30%) who are also in poverty. From where I live in Silverdale on Morecambe Bay fifteen miles can cost 15 years in average life expectancy.

1.3. Ontological space

All this has added post-economic crisis to the other ‘posts’ that exemplify the ontological quality of the new political space: post-Christendom, postmodern, post-secular, post-millennial, post-political and post-truth. Since the 1960s, it has become increasingly clear that the social contract between the state and the institutions of the Christian religion has been unravelling fast. This is exemplified by the post-Christendom literature associated with the work of Stuart Murray Williams (2004) and more recently Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead’s analysis of the current situation of the Church of England (2016). At the same time, the apparent certainties of modernity have given way to the issues of identity and narrative relativism associated with post-modernity. To the surprise of some, the secularisation consequent on modernity’s rejection of the transcendent has not survived post-modernity and since the millennium has tended to give way to a resilient post-secularity. Graham Ward suggests that this new visibility of religion takes three forms: fundamentalism, deprivatisation and commodification (2009, 117–158). All of these may be regarded as signs of, or reactions to, the political space that is opening up. Fundamentalism reasserts and intensifies one particular perspective in times of uncertainty and as such may be regarded as a reaction to the new political space. Deprivatisation on the other hand recognises a new public role for religion in challenging and shaping society for good or ill. Commodification, although a manifestation of biopower, also has the capacity to drive the reinchantment and remythologisation of contemporary life to the point that ‘contemporary living is shot through with metaphysical themes, desires and dreams’ (152).

The rise in what has been described as the post-political and post-truth populism exemplified in the UK’s Brexit and the USA’s Trump administration is another kind of evidence of new political space and, as René Girard’s thesis suggests, is at least in part the attempt to blame the establishment and scapegoat the immigrant Other for the anomic breakdown of the familiar social order (2011). Beyond the identification of a momentous shift and tracking its outworking lies a whole new debate about the very nature of the political that clearly recognises all this as evidence of an ontological shift. As Rowan Williams explains, this is a movement away from the politics that accounts for human action as the successful assertion of will. Political action understood as only meaningful in terms of the successful assertion of power, ‘raises the spectre of the purest fascism, an uncriticizable exercise of social power in the name of a supposed corporate assertion’ (Davis, Milbank, and Žižek 2005, 1–2).

1.4. European space

The impact of the 2008 economic crisis is, of course, not only felt in the UK. In the years immediately prior to the June 2016 EU referendum I was part of a European-wide bid for Horizon 20:20 funds exploring the emergence of new political space throughout the EU as a whole. Winston Churchill’s post-war statement at the Council of Europe in 1948 that ‘We cannot aim at anything less than the union of Europe as a whole’ and Robert Schuman’s bold 1960s vision of a Europe ‘free of its vain fratricidal fights and decidedly committed to the prosperity, security and peace-providing path of community’ (Schumann 2010, 12) have rapidly submerged into the past. The heady days of German reunification and the confident accession of new member states to a politically progressive and economically sustainable bloc of nations in the 1980s and 1990s have all but disappeared. As the introduction to the now moth-balled bid put it, ‘the current loss of a deeper vision, sensibility and direction of travel is contributing to a palpable sense of fragmentation and malaise in the face of unprecedented post-millennial pressures associated with migration, and widening social and economic inequality.’

2. Cultivation not colonisation

This issue of Global Discourse explores the view that the contemporary socio-political moment offers an opportunity for political interventions that depart from the normal expectations for the exercise of power. For several years a serendipitous and open network of friends consisting of practitioners from academic, statutory, third sector, faith community and business contexts have been observing and reflecting on this emerging space and asking what linguistic approach might best enable it to become a place for human flourishing. Does it need recovering, stewarding, defending, guarding or what? No word seemed suitable until the word ‘cultivation’ emerged. This has proved to be a creative metaphor. It both points the way to healthy growth and recognises dehumanising intrusions into the space that need responding to in ways that preserve life, not destroy it. The desire to cultivate the new political space for overall well-being rather than colonise it again with ideology or political system is the unifying factor for the six articles and responses that follow.

Timothy Stacey (2018) analyses the rise of populism over the last 10 years and argues that myths of solidarity have been undermined by the rise of liberalism, and that restoring such myths to the centre of contemporary politics is vital to challenging the myths of division that fuel populism. Anna Rowlands (2018), St Hilda Associate Professor of Catholic Thought and Practice at the University of Durham, responds by contextualising the piece in past and present discussions of social solidarity common good. Roger Haydon Mitchell (2018) proposes ways that the politics of love might draw on originary Christian myths to provide an antidote to the myths of division, and Andy Knox (2018), Director of Population Health and Engagement for Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, responds from his practical experience. Astrid Nordin and Graham Smith (2018) articulate a politics of friendship focusing on a new way of thinking which offers open-ended relations between persons based not on sameness, but otherness and difference. Adam Roberts (2018), Midwest Correspondent of The Economist, responds, drawing on his recent role as a journalist in Europe, and now in the USA. Ben Wood (2018) reconsiders the late modern theologian Karl Barth and author E. M. Forster to propose ways in which liberal politics might recover a public creed which grounds the language of liberty in a robust account of community, friendship and care, and Professor Elaine Graham (2018), Grosvenor Research Professor at the University of Chester, responds. Sue Mitchell and Francisco Jose Eiroa-Orosa (2018) offer substantive research into how experiences of self-transcendence may emerge in the choice of altruistic values, to ‘love an enemy’, and present an innovative aesthetic discourse analysis as a means to explore the motivational or moral impulse of personhood, where the self becomes ‘sensible’ to change. Hannah Intezar and Paul Sullivan (2018) respond from their complementary research at the University of Bradford. Finally, Bradley Jersak (2018) offers a constructive vision that attempts to transcend partisan politics and strives for an alternative society that invites divergent streams to draw near for a conversation concerning the greater goods of restorative justice and inclusive care and Ron Dart (2018), Associate Professor of Political Science in the University of the Fraser Valley, provides a compelling response that rounds off the whole issue. It is the hope of the editors that these articles and their responses will instigate a wide discussion and emanate in urgent practical action.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.