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Abstract

French

The author’s aim is to offer some critical observations on usage of the terms ‘community’ and ‘faith community’. The central argument is that ‘community’ is a weasel word that occurs frequently in discourses at the levels of everyday life, public policy-making, welfare services and social scientific analysis. The article begins by reviewing relatively uncontentious uses of ‘community’. The second section of the article analyses the UK government’s usage of the term ‘faith community’ in policy documents since 1997. And the third section explores two particularly problematic issues: on the one hand a tension that arises within official discourses about faith communities and, on the other, the UK government’s practice of treating faith communities as if they were undifferentiated collectivities. The conclusion urges sociologists of religion to avoid uncritically reproducing official discourses about faith communities.

Keywords

community faith multiculturalism neo-liberalism religion

Introduction

The main aim of this paper is to offer some critical observations on the ways in which social scientists and others tend to use the terms ‘community’ and ‘faith community’, primarily in the UK. It is an extension of arguments that I have been developing for several years about sociological discussions of so-called public religions (Beckford, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012) and is addressed to scholars who, in recent decades, have deployed the term ‘faith communities’ in their analyses of religious change and continuity. To be blunt, I am deeply sceptical about the claim that religion has made a triumphant and positive return to the public sphere of Western democratic societies and to other parts of the world. In a nutshell, my argument is that the visibility of religion has certainly increased in the public sphere of many societies. But in the case of the UK this has more to do with successive governments’ communitarian and neo-liberal policies for managing religious and ethnic diversity than with any revitalisation of religions. These policies tend to constitute religions as ‘faith communities’ for instrumental reasons.

Another reason for focusing critically on the term ‘community’ in this paper is that recent attempts to reinvigorate the sociology of religion tend to take ‘community’ for granted and fail to ask critical questions about the concept. I have in mind the various proposals for developing a ‘strong program’ of research (Smilde and May, 2010), ‘new approaches in the sociology of religion’ (Davie, 2004), ‘a new agenda for the sociology of religion’ (Davie, 2013), ‘de-centering and re-centering’ the sociology of religion (Bender et al., 2013) and finding ‘new directions’ for the sociology of religion (Smith, 2008). All of these proposals are important and exciting; but none of them grapples with the fundamental difficulties that arise from the uncritical use of terms such as ‘faith community’.

I am not going to suggest, however, that the term ‘community’ should be abandoned altogether. My proposal is that it would be better to adopt a self-denying ordinance on using the term without qualification. Ideally, we should find better, less ambiguous alternatives. But in any case it would be helpful if sociologists of religion at least clarified the various meanings that they attribute to ‘faith community’ whenever they use the term.

Let me begin with an example of the kind of discursive change that is at the centre of this article’s concerns. In June 2013 the national organisation for Girl Guides and Brownies in the UK announced that Guides and Brownies will no longer have to make a promise ‘to love my God’. The form that the promise took in 1994 was:

I promise that I will do my best:

To love my God,

To serve the Queen and my country,

To help other people

And to keep the Guide law.

The new promise is:

I promise that I will do my best:

To be true to myself and develop my beliefs

To serve the Queen and my community

To help other people and

To keep the Guide law.

Most of the discussion following this change was about the loss of reference to love of God and the adoption of a rhetoric of personal authenticity. But for me the most striking change is the substitution of ‘my community’ for ‘my country’. My argument here is that ‘community’ is a weasel word that occurs frequently in discourses at the levels of everyday life, public policy-making, the delivery of welfare services and social scientific analysis. It can mean many different things; it has no stable content but is most often used to elicit positive responses, especially in connection with religion or faith.

Development of ‘community’

Sociological uses of the term ‘community’ have come to display bewildering variety since it achieved the status of a classical sociological concept in Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). The variety is so great, in fact, that George Hillery (1955) counted as many as 94 different meanings of the term. For all that, his conclusion is nowadays questionable: ‘Most … are in basic agreement that community consists of persons in social interaction within a geographic area and having one or more additional ties’ (Hillery, 1955: 111). Indeed, Steven Brint (2001) has argued that it is now possible and important to acknowledge that there are many different types and sub-types of community.² For example, ‘belief-based elective communities’ tend to combine fraternalism and illiberalism; by contrast, ‘activity-based elective communities, and non ideological imagined and virtual communities typically combine a measure of fraternalism with few constraints on individual freedoms and low levels of defensiveness in relation to outsiders.’ (Brint, 2001: 20). My argument is that discursive uses of the term ‘community’ are also varied and complex, especially in relation to religious or faith communities.

Some uses of ‘community’ are relatively technical and unproblematic. For example, Canon 608 in the Catholic Church’s canon law classifies ‘religious communities’ among Religious Institutes as follows :

A religious community is to live in a lawfully constituted house, under the authority of a Superior designated according to the norms of law. Each house is to have at least an oratory, in which the Eucharist is celebrated and reserved, so that it may truly be the center of the community.

The members of such institutes are expected to live in a ‘fraternal community’ (Canon 619) in accordance with common rules. Similarly, the Church of England specifies that ‘Anglican religious orders are organisations of laity and/or clergy in the Anglican Communion who live under a common rule’.³

A second relatively straightforward use of the term ‘community’ is in relation to a spatial location such as a neighbourhood, a village, a town or a country that is served by a religious organisation. Again, the Church of England regards itself as having ‘a Christian presence in every community’. Indeed, Bryan Wilson (1982: 154) argued that ‘religion may be said to have its source in, and to draw its strength from, the community, the local, persisting relationships of the relatively stable group’. For him, religion amounted to ‘the ideology of community’. Good examples of the spatial settings in which aspects of religions thrive are easy to find. Two particularly interesting examples are the long-running Community Religions project at the University of Leeds⁴ and Tony Carnes’s ‘A Journey through NYC Religions’.⁵

A third, but less clear-cut, use of the term ‘community’ is in reference to the category of people and groups who identify or associate themselves to varying degrees with a particular religious tradition or way of life. Thus, the ‘Methodist community’ refers to people who formally belong to Methodist churches but it also includes those who do not necessarily count themselves as members whilst supporting or sympathising with what they consider to be Methodist ideas, values and ways of life. In this sense, people who are in the general ambit of the Methodist Church – however tenuously – can be regarded as part of its community in this sense of the term.

These three basic references of the term ‘community’ – to common rules, to spatial settings and to general identification – have been complemented in recent decades by further subtleties and nuances. They include imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), communities of discourse (Wuthnow, 1989), communities of witches (Berger, 1999), communities of practice (Cox, 2005), virtual communities (Rheingold, 2000), ‘Metropolitan Community Churches’ (Warner, 2005) and ‘community chaplaincy’ (Whitehead, 2011). The emphasis in these cases is on the partial, shifting and constructed character of the ties that bind some people together some of the time for some purposes. They may be brought together by ‘lifestyle politics’, ‘identity politics’ or consumerism. As a result, the formerly thriving field of community studies has, not surprisingly, given way in large measure to sociological and anthropological interest in various forms of social networks – local, transnational, global or virtual.

But what interests me most is the use that is increasingly made of the terms ‘community’, ‘religious community’ and ‘faith community’ in academic, political and popular discourses about religion. It is as if the old currency of ‘churches’, ‘denominations’, ‘sects’ and ‘religious organisations’ has been converted into a new currency of much less concrete, more fluid and more extensive collectivities labelled ‘communities’. The new currency blurs the distinctions between different types of religious organisation. It reduces them all to the same form, namely, undifferentiated collectivities among others in the public sphere. Sociological curiosity about the organisational dynamics of different types of religious organisations has given way to interest in aggregates of religious actors – identified or self-identified to varying degrees with religious faith traditions – who co-operate or compete with each other in public life.

The discursive shift towards talk of faith communities as actors in the public sphere can be traced back to religious, political and academic roots. One of the most significant of these was the Inner Cities Religious Council (ICRC), which was set up with government funding of £2.5 million in 1992 to help combat deprivation and social exclusion in urban areas, where churches were thought to be among the few structures capable of motivating local residents to improve life in their localities (Taylor, 2003: 125–126). The ICRC played a major role in identifying ‘faith communities’ – and inter-faith activities – as potential agents of government policies for regenerating areas of urban deprivation. It may also have had the effect of diverting attention away from grievances framed in terms of ‘race’ or ethnicity.

Subsequently, policy documents issued by the New Labour government, which came to power in 1997, made frequent references to the idea that the government intended to work in partnership with ‘faith communities’ as part of a broader communitarian strategy. Early examples include Home Office documents such as ‘Compact on relations between government and the voluntary and community sector in England’ (1998) and ‘Report of the Policy Action Team on community self-help’ (1999). And, although the attacks launched in the name of violent Islamism in New York and Washington, DC, in 2001, in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 led to a heightened concern with ‘community cohesion’ rather than with community for its own sake (Worley, 2005), the notion of partnership between faith communities and the UK state remains active. Indeed, the UK government’s security policies routinely stress the need for effective partnership with minority faith communities in the struggle against violent religious extremism. Again, Home Office documents such as ‘Firm foundations. The government’s framework for community capacity building’ (2004a) and ‘Strength in diversity. Cooperation between government and faith communities.’ (2004b) give the clearest account of government policies at that time. Later policy documents issued by the Department for Communities and Local Government maintain the same positive stance towards partnership with faith communities. In particular, ‘Face to face and side by side. A framework for partnership in our multi faith society’ (2008) sets out a wide range of projects to be funded by government because ‘When there are problems in a neighbourhood – whether it is drugs, crime, violence or pollution – faith communities are often the first on the scene, making a difference and remaining steadfast and committed where others might despair.’ (2008: 5).

My approach to questions about changes in discourses of community begins by asking how the meaning of certain statements undergoes changes when the word ‘community’ is deployed in place of other ways of denoting individuals and groups associated with particular religions. For example, how do statements made about Muslims, Mormons or Orthodox Christians differ from statements about ‘Muslim communities’, ‘Mormon communities’ or ‘Orthodox communities’? What is added – or lost – by inserting the word ‘communities’? In this respect, my aim is to extend some of the analyses that have been made in the past of cognate expressions such as ‘ethnic community’ (Baumann, 1996, 1999). I shall select three particular implications of the discursive shift towards ‘community’.

Implications of the term ‘community’

The first implication of adopting the language of communities is to suggest that they are collectivities with an identifiable corporate identity and interests, about which it is possible to make meaningful generalisations. A closely allied implication is that all or most of the members of a religious community are alike in some significant way. And a further implication is that there are very few practitioners of religions who lie outside their respective communities. In short, the term ‘community’ is widely employed to imply the boundedness, the homogeneity and the inclusiveness of particular groupings of religionists. Greg Smith (2004) was among the first to comment on this implication and on what he regarded as the simplistic character of the UK state’s approach to engaging with religious diversity in British cities.

A second implication is that religious communities are – or can be – social agents capable of taking actions in the public sphere and of responding to the actions of other agents. This makes it possible for governments and state agencies to ‘interpellate’ or address faith communities as would-be partners in the delivery of public policies and services. For example, Kim Knott (2009: 1) has drawn attention to

the process by which British Hindus have sought to become a ‘faith community’ in response to local civic pressures and the intensification of government rhetoric on harnessing the capacity of religious bodies in support of public policy, and also as an expression of Hindu nationalist and ecumenical interests.

In this sense, talk of faith communities implies that they are deployable agents capable not only of contributing to public debates but also of entering into agreements, partnerships and contracts with other public agents. What is more, the British government colludes with the doctrine of the Inter Faith Network of the UK that there are only nine ‘major faith communities’ and a limited number of ‘national faith community bodies’ in the country (Inter Faith Network, 2012). This begs the question of how entire ‘faith communities’ could ever be fairly or adequately represented in democratic institutions.

A third implication is that religious communities are all alike because they promote the same thing called ‘faith’ or ‘faithfulness’. Moreover, the implication is that, taken collectively, religious communities constitute a single, identifiable ‘faith sector’ in British public life – alongside, say, the business sector or the education sector. Therefore, when UK governments refer to ‘the faith communities’, the implication is that there are no other significant and acceptable religious forces in the public sphere beyond the faith communities. This rhetorical move makes it relatively easy for public authorities to ignore or to marginalise religious groups that are not considered part of broader communities (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons vis-à-vis ‘the Christian faith community’ or Ahmadiyyas vis-à-vis ‘the Muslim faith community’ – despite the fact that they refer to themselves formally as the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community). But good social scientists know that public authorities operate with ‘definitions of acceptable difference’ (Leavelle, 2010: 175) which tend either to exclude certain minorities from participation in the public sphere or to make such participation possible only on terms that are unattractive to those minorities. The example Leavelle offers is of Native peoples in the USA who are not attracted towards ‘ common religious categories and participation in active forms of interreligious dialogue’ (Leavelle, 2010: 174). They may seek ‘recognition and respect for their religious practices and sacred sites’, but they remain sceptical towards consultation processes that have failed to deliver decolonisation in the past.

These developments in the discursive use of the term ‘faith community’ have not taken place in isolation from other developments. In particular, philosophical and public debates about multiculturalism in the UK have frequently revolved around competing arguments not only about the meaning of ‘community’ but also about the usefulness of framing public policies to outlaw unfair discrimination and to reduce inequalities for communities as well as for individuals. For example, an influential report on ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’ (Runnymede Trust, 2000) adopted an approach that placed communities at the heart of multiculturalism. It argued that ‘Britain should develop both as a community of citizens (the liberal view) and as a community of communities (the pluralist view)’ (Runnymede Trust, 2000: xv), adding that Britain’s fundamental need was:

to treat people equally and with due respect for difference; to treasure the rights and freedoms of individuals and to cherish belonging, cohesion and solidarity. Neither equality nor respect for difference is a sufficient value in itself. The two must be held together, mutually challenging and supportive (Runnymede Trust 2000: xvii).

‘Political multiculturalism’ is Tariq Modood’s (2009: 169) way of designating this form of ‘difference-affirming equality, with related notions of respect, recognition and identity’. It entails protecting religious communities against discrimination, treating religions even-handedly and including religions in the normal life of social institutions. But the argument has been taken further by Lori Beaman’s (2012: 215) search for a form of ‘deep equality’ which would not necessarily entail the abandonment of multiculturalism but would require shifting the emphasis from difference to common ground. The search for deep equality would also go beyond attempts to produce ‘reasonable accommodation’ and purely formal equality by calling into question ‘the very social construction of difference’ and its presumption of a Christian ‘normal’ in many western countries. One implication of this approach is that all discourse of majority and minority communities would need to be reconsidered.

Communities were also at the heart of the political philosophy of the kind of communitarianism that Amitai Etzioni (1994) famously advocated in the 1990s. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, imported communitarian ideals into many of his New Labour government’s policies in the belief that they could turn the UK into a ‘community of communities’, thereby taking a middle path between individualistic neo-liberalism, collectivist socialism or state-oriented social democracy.⁶ But long before Blair left office in 2007 government policies were already shifting towards an emphasis on the economic benefits supposedly to be gained from encouraging communities to be entrepreneurial and market-oriented as well as capable of supplying moral values and social harmony. At the same time, public policies came to stress the need for all communities to share at least a minimum of common values required to ensure social cohesion and harmony. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government that took office in 2010 therefore asserted that: ‘We believe that core values and experience must be held in common … . It is these values which make it possible for people to live and work together, to bridge boundaries between communities and to play a full role in society’ (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012: 4).

The coalition government continues to regard communities as instigators of potentially profitable enterprises and deliverers of public services in partnership with agencies of the British state. Its policies include using the parish infrastructure of the Church of England to further inter faith relations; encouraging and funding inter faith activities; and inducing religious groups to set up ‘faith schools’ and ‘free schools’ with state funding. In the government’s view, ‘Faith communities are involved in a huge range of activities and projects to improve communities, and we are looking at ways to encourage them to join up effectively and overcome bureaucratic barriers’ (Department of Communities and Local Government, 2012: 16). Critical commentators have highlighted the ambiguous position in which these government policies thereby place all voluntary organisations including faith communities (Clarke, 2004; Carmel and Harlock, 2008). There is strong encouragement for community organisations to remain voluntary and independent from the state, but they also find themselves subject to increasingly intrusive monitoring and management by the state of their finances, activities and capacity to be in partnership with it. Adam Dinham (2012: 158) has also drawn attention to a tension between faith and prevailing policies for promoting social enterprise among faith communities.

Difficulties with ‘community’

‘Community’ has the great advantage of sounding warm, supportive and wholesome in many contexts.⁷ It conjures up the feelings of security that arise from experiences of the middle ground or the Third Way between bleak individualism and harsh statism. So far so good. But the term community – in combination with ‘faith’ or not – also faces some formidable problems. As Gerd Baumann (1996, 1999) and others have argued, using ‘community’ as an analytical concept or as a component of social and public policy runs several risks. First, it tends to exaggerate the extent to which communities are unitary, cohesive and clearly bounded. Second, there is concern that some of the people who claim to be community leaders may oppress or exploit the members of their community (Okin, 1999; Patel and Siddiqui, 2010). Third, giving priority to policies that reify communities may put at risk the human and civil rights of their individual members, especially if the law grants concessions to religious communities to be exempt from, for example, aspects of anti-discrimination legislation (British Humanist Association, 2007). In other words, the right to the equality of religion or belief may appear to take precedence over other legally protected rights. A stronger formulation of this point is that ‘(…) equality of religion or belief is almost certainly at odds both with a wide range of multicultural policy positions and with one of the main features of its underlying ideology’ (Macey and Carling, 2011: 156).

But from my point of view there are two other, less well explored difficulties with discourses about the term ‘faith communities’. One difficulty arises from the fact that the term contains a tension between two different discursive constructions. On the one hand, policy makers in Britain often frame faith communities as resources that can be deployed in pursuit of public policies. This is an instrumental or expedient construction of communities as potentially useful means for the achievement of policy goals. According to Adam Dinham (2012: 75, 177), for example, ‘Religious groups are sought out and valued as repositories of resources for markets (usually as deliverers of welfare services which would otherwise not exist).’ On the other hand, the same discourse also portrays faith communities as good things in themselves that can promote human flourishing. This is a construction of communities as intrinsically valuable in themselves precisely because they embody non-instrumental values. The tension between evaluations of faith communities based on either their instrumental or their intrinsic value is just one of the ambiguities and ironies that render unqualified use of the term ‘community’ problematic.

A second problematic aspect of uncritical academic and political discourses about ‘faith communities’ is that they convey an image of relatively undifferentiated collectivities. They tend to conceal the fact that large collectivities of, say, Christians, Hindus or Muslims are differentiated and conflicted in many ways but especially in terms of the differences in the power available to their members collectively and individually. This is particularly marked in religious organisations and inter-faith groups where patriarchal attitudes are prevalent (Patel and Siddiqui, 2010; Macey and Carling, 2011). In other words, religious collectivities are not necessarily unitary, cohesive or equal, but agencies of government interpellate or address them as if the distinctions between, for example, elite and mass members, national and local levels, men and women, young and old were irrelevant or unimportant. Yet, research often finds that people who identify themselves in religious terms do not necessarily share the policies and practices pursued by elite groups within the organisations that claim to represent their ‘communities’. The locus classicus is James Wood’s findings about the resistance of ordinary members of mainstream Protestant denominations in the USA to some of the policies on civil rights and integration that were being implemented by their churches’ leaders in the 1960s (Wood, 1970; Wood and Zald, 1966). What is required, then, is greater attention to the differences between the discourses that divide collectivities labelled ‘faith communities’ as well as to the discourses that separate the ‘communities’ from each another and from the rest of society. The UK government’s practice of addressing ‘faith communities’ as if they were undifferentiated entities within a single ‘faith sector’ runs the risk of appearing naïve, disingenuous or misleading. It would be helpful, then, if sociologists could at least set a good example by identifying the precise agencies which actually claim to speak on behalf of the much more nebulous ‘faith communities’ in response to interpellation by governments.

Conclusions

The visibility of religions has undoubtedly increased in the public spheres of many western societies in recent decades. But this is not necessarily evidence of the revitalisation of religion. Nor does it show that the slow trend towards secularity has suddenly been halted, reversed, diverted or surpassed by something as nonsensical as post-secularity (Beckford, 2012). In the case of the UK, at least, there are two factors which can account for the increased visibility of religion in public life. One is the implementation of public policies for managing the growth of religious and ethno-religious diversity as a consequence of migration and settlement in the context of glocalisation (Robertson, 1995; Beyer and Beaman, 2007). These policies relate to, for example, security concerns, issues arising from religio-ethnic tensions, legislation concerning unfair discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief, legislation to promote various equalities, and the persistence of racism and islamophobia. The other factor is the raft of political and public policies that have embodied neo-liberal doctrines about reducing the scope and cost of the state at national and local levels, promoting social cohesion as a solution to structural problems with the economy, encouraging programmes of social enterprise in the community and voluntary sectors, and slashing entitlement to social welfare.

The combination of these two factors – efforts to manage ethno-religious diversity and implementation of neo-liberal programmes of ‘structural adjustment’ – has helped to heighten the salience of religion (a) as a site of perceived problems and (b) as a source of purported solutions. This is why successive UK governments have interpellated ‘faith communities’ as partners in the delivery of various services and the development of social enterprise. The question is whether social scientists should simply reproduce this discourse about ‘faith communities’ or whether they should subject the discourse to their own critical analysis in recognition of the difficulties that this article has identified with unqualified use of the concept ‘community’.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

James A BECKFORD, a Fellow of the British Academy, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Warwick. His main fields of research are the comparative sociology of religions and social theory. His publications include The trumpet of prophecy. A sociological analysis of Jehovah’s Witnesses (1975), Cult controversies (1985), Religion and advanced industrial society (1989), Religion in prison (1998, with Sophie Gilliat), Social theory and religion (2003), Muslims in prison: Challenge and change in Britain and France (2005, with D Joly and F Khosrokhavar) and The Sage handbook of the sociology of religion (2007 co-edited with NJ Demerath III).

Address: Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

Email: j.a.beckford@warwick.ac.uk

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‘Community’ in the sociology of religion: The case of Britain

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Development of ‘community’

Implications of the term ‘community’

Difficulties with ‘community’

Conclusions

Footnotes

Funding

Notes

Author biography

References