Diversity as neoliberal governmentality: Towards a new sociological genealogy of religion

Abstract

In this article, I explore the connections between neoliberal capitalism and religion. I do so by tracing the roots of these connections as they evolved during the second part of the 20th century into the present. My main argument is that in contemporary Western societies the most important connections between neoliberal capitalism and religion emerge through the ways in which regimes of religious diversity have become a central form of power that can be fruitfully explored through the Foucauldian notion of governmentality.

Introduction

In this article, I explore the connections between neoliberal capitalism and religion. I do so by tracing the roots of these connections as they evolved during the second part of the 20th century into the present. My main argument is that in contemporary Western societies the most important connections between neoliberal capitalism and religion emerge through the ways in which regimes of religious diversity have become a central form of power that can be fruitfully explored through the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. As a broad political project, diversity discourse opposes both spatial segregation and enforced cultural homogenization by promoting social mixing and visible difference. Pointing to a mode of power that rests on people’s enlistment into governmental projects and their adherence to predefined social categories, the perspective of governmentality suggests that regimes of religious diversity not only recognize but also govern religious identities and that they do so in line with neoliberal premises of mobility, consumer choice and market conformity. Methodologically, the article is not based on empirical research but on the analysis of social scientific discourses on the rise and entwinement of religion and diversity as twin concepts of neoliberal modernity.

With regard to existing research, this theoretical move implies two distinct interventions. On the one hand, there is a range of anthropological studies that have drawn on the concept of governmentality in order to explore how in contemporary global society secularism works as a discursive frame for constructing notions of liberal and illiberal, legitimate and illegitimate religion and to define, and exert power over, the religious sensibilities and subjectivities of diverse populations (Asad, 2003; Mahmood, 2006). On the other hand, there is a wide range of studies in the sociology of religion that explore how religious diversity, driven by transnational migration or religious innovation, is governed by state administrations, negotiated by religious communities, and understood in everyday life (Koenig, 2005; Giordan and Pace, 2015).

Contrary to the first approach, I suggest that while secularism is surely an important mode of governmentality of religion, religious diversity has itself become a form of governmentality that is not necessarily subordinated to secularism. Many of the anthropological studies have tended to downplay the power of religion in comparison to that of secularism. Contrary to the second approach, I argue that religious diversity is not only something which is already there and to which states and city administrations merely respond but that these institutional responses actively shape the understandings of religious diversity that circulate in society and amongst populations, thereby reconfiguring the very significance of religion for individuals and groups. I thus suggest an approach to the study of religious diversity that is on the one hand more constructivist, and on the other hand more informed by critical political economy, focusing less on how religious diversity is subjectively experienced, collectively negotiated and politically governed, and more on how religious diversity is folded into the genealogical trajectory of neoliberal forms of power through which such experiences, negotiations and practices of governance are made possible.

Two observations and some notes on theories of religion and economy

I begin with two ethnographic observations from Quebec and Catalonia, the field sites of an ongoing project on institutional responses to religious diversity (Burchardt, 2016). In September 2013, the government of Quebec publicized its plans for a ‘Charter of Quebec Values’, formerly also called ‘Charter of Secularism’. A central component of the Charter was to ban the wearing of ostentatious religious signs for all employees in the state sector. Shortly afterwards, one of the biggest hospitals of Toronto initiated an advertising campaign in the Montreal press calling for hospital staff to move to Toronto in case they lost their jobs because of the Charter, and to come and work in an atmosphere of respect for diversity ¹ . The idea of competition between Montreal and Toronto is nothing new and economic questions always played a role in polemics over Quebec independence. Suddenly, however, the spectres of capital flight turned into spectres of labour flight and became linked to religion.

Similarly, Catalonia witnessed diverse municipal attempts to ban Islamic full-face veiling between 2010 and 2014 (Burchardt et al., 2015). A group of city governments also brought the issue into the Catalan parliament forcing the legislature to discuss it and, they hoped, pass a regional regulation against face-veiling. However, in interviews, some of the conservative party activists that pushed the initiative told me that the ban is unlikely to be passed because of economic considerations. According to them, economic relationships with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates were too important to be put at risk because of a handful of niqab-wearing women. ²

In the contemporary sociology of religion, these kinds of episodes are usually framed in terms of resurgent religion, or of militant secularism attempting to keep unwanted religious practices outside the public sphere (Göle, 2015). What is often lost in such forms of analysis are the ways in which contemporary manifestations of religion are linked to neoliberal capitalism. Both initiatives described above had considerable political support but finally failed, and these failures to introduce more radical forms of secularism were indeed intricately entwined with the logic of neoliberal capitalism.

These entwinements, however, differ from those that sociologists interested in religion and economy have paid most attention to so far. In a founding study of sociology, Weber (1998 [1927]) developed an institutional theory of how religious ethics shape economic behaviour. More recently, Beyer (2013) has drawn on systems theory to show how, in global society, religion and markets are modelled on one another. In addition, Martikainen and Gauthier (2013) have sketched out more general ideas about religion and economy. Echoing earlier observations by Berger (1967) and Roof (2001), they also made the more specific argument that the religious field is currently being reconfigured by marketization processes in which religion becomes a product to be produced, advertised, promoted, and consumed within an overall logic of competiveness.

Foucauldian perspectives of governmentality, by contrast, are chiefly interested in how power in neoliberalism operates through practices of classification, labelling and naming, that is, through tying people to particular social categories. Defined by Foucault (1988: 19) as the contact point between technologies of power and technologies of the self, governmentality refers to practices that govern human behaviour through forms of address, which shape subjectivities and identities. While Foucault’s main concern lay with the classification of people in administrative categories, these also include modern identity categories such as religion. I suggest that contemporary regimes of religious diversity increasingly work through such practices of classification. As a consequence, state administrations, especially those linked to immigrant integration, recognize and govern citizens through their religious allegiances, offer services and impose sanctions linked to them. As states confer rights to citizens as religious practitioners, religion increasingly qualifies citizenship (Lehmann, 2013).

Following Foucauldian intuitions, Ian Hacking (2006) argued that the human beings modern science deals with have little in common with everyday life understandings of humans, and that science was therefore chiefly about ‘making up people’. Similarly, I argue that the religious believers on which regimes of religious diversity are founded do not exist prior to these regimes and that religious diversity is indeed a form of ‘making up people[s]’. While religious communities making claims to religious diversity certainly exist, the very regime in which they operate reinvents them as communities of citizens. I concur with Mahmood (2015: 23) that ‘the modern secular state is not simply a neutral arbiter of religious differences; it also produces and creates them’. While remaining agnostic about causal directions, I note here the parallelisms between the rises of neoliberalism and multiculturalism, and subsequently of the diversity paradigm and the way it is premised on the idea that people have identities through which they can be governed.

In what follows I describe the emergence of new forms of governmentality around religion through four distinct moments: 1) post-Second World War secular modernization, 2) the emergence of new spiritualities during the 1960s, 3) the rise of conversion-led religious movements (originating from evangelical Christianity and Islam), and 4) contemporary regimes of religious diversity.

Moments of certainty: The heyday of modernization

While the most dramatic reconceptualizations of religion in the sociology of religion happened in the wake of the end of the Cold War, they were in some way prepared by earlier developments that occurred amidst the precarious stabilization of the ideologically divided world order after the Second World War. In order to render these changes intelligible, we need to place them in the context of post-war modernization and its overarching paradigm of production. In the West, post-war modernization implied the restoration of market-driven economies, Keynesian interventionist welfare states, liberal governance and parliamentary democracy, as well as the rule of law and educational expansionism, all which were meant to restore public and popular faith in reason and progress. If certainty was the paramount value, normalization was the substrate that carried it.

In the Soviet world, post-war modernization implied the nationalization of the means of production, the building of a planned economy and centralized administrative rule, instead of autonomous pluralist politics. But apart from that, things were not dramatically different (Meyer, 2000), both ideologies agreeing on the principle notions of production and growth (Wagner, 2002). In the so-called ‘Third World’, by and large, decolonizing or recently-decolonized states sought to fashion themselves in the image of modernist principles of interventionist statecraft, relying on lofty fantasies of the malleability of the social order and their own mission in history. As they sought, or were incited or forced, to emulate either the capitalist or the communist model of economy and society, they were definitely co-opted, if to some degree only on paper, into the project of modernist progress. All of these social formations were expressions of ‘solid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) or ‘organized modernity’. According to Wagner (2002: 123), the latter phrase designates the ‘conventionalization of social practices within set boundaries’.

Such conventionalization was certainly reflected in mainstream sociology, especially the North American variant (Parsons and Shils, 1951), with its dominant paradigm of modernization theory according to which societies would tend successively to adopt elements of the modernization package because of its inherent superior efficiency. Post-war modernization theories also assumed that the different elements of the modernization package (the nation state, liberal democracy, the rule of law, modern science and so on) would depend on one another (Lerner, 1958; Lipset, 1959).

Within this conception of modern society, it was assumed that the social significance of religion was reduced to the internal affairs of communities of worshippers and the sphere of the private life of family values and domestic devotion. The shrinking importance of religion for society was summarized in the paradigm of secularization, which was an integral part of the modernization story in its three versions: it was assumed to be achieved 1) as a mechanistic, quasi-natural but peaceful process in the West; 2) through antagonistic power struggles in the Communist world; and 3) through the ceding of visionary power to modernist sovereign states and their historical mission in post-colonial countries. At the same time, Western modernization theorists assumed that, while pathways might differ, the outcomes would, in the long run, be the same and that history would unfold through diffusion pushing towards convergence (Rostow, 1959). It was then the rapid economic and political rise of the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies (Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea), as well as of China, India and Brazil, that contributed to the belated recognition of the modernity of these societies by (Western) sociology and that unsettled the hitherto prevalent identification of modernity with Western civilization. Importantly, their different experiences with modern religion have also helped to further unsettle the global pretensions of a uniform secularization paradigm (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, 2012).

However, well before these global pretensions were proved wrong, the Iranian revolution of 1979 inserted a moment of major irritation and disturbance into the genealogical pathways of modernist secular thought. Happening in a modernizing country with a pro-American regime, this was a revolution that was celebrated, by Foucault (1978) and many others, as anti-capitalist while not adopting Soviet-style politics or tendencies, much less Communist mainstream thinking about religion. Given that, in books on the sociology of religion, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is conventionally referred to as the Ur-scene of global religious revitalization and resurgence, it seems remarkable that its capitalist problematique is widely forgotten.

From solid to liquid modernity

In the West, however, during the 1960s we see developments that increasingly disrupt these images and storylines. The emergence of diverse countercultures, the student movement and especially the hippie movement framed a context in which a huge variety of spiritualities would emerge and flourish. Sociologist Talcott Parsons (1973) summarized the cultural outcomes of all this in the notion of the ‘expressive revolution’. In a way, this was the beginning of the long walk towards post-material values centred on ideas of self-fulfilment and self-realization, which some of the most influential work on value change later found to be central to Western culture and presumably the world at large (Inglehart, 1997). That some post-material cultural orientations have religious sources matters here, and not only because initially Inglehart did not find them important. It also matters because these sources point towards a moment in which religion is intricately entangled with the passage from solid modernity to liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000).

These entanglements are expressed, among other things, in processes of detraditionalization (Heelas et al., 1996), i.e. the generalized rejection of traditional forms of legitimating authority, institutions and people’s allegiance to them. The more individual choices and subjectivity are conceptualized as authoritative of legitimate agency, the more we see the reproduction of at least some of the inherited religious institutions and the communities they sustain coming under pressure. This also implied that inherited anthropological and sociological understandings of religion were insufficient to capture the varieties and meanings of spiritual and religious life as it unfolded after the end of solid modernity. The initial moment making researchers aware of this was the publication of Thomas Luckmann’s book The Invisible Religion in 1960. In this book, Luckmann denounced sociology’s blindness vis-à-vis the deeper religious implications of the cultural changes in the West and proposed a neo-Durkheimian reading of individualism, subjectivity and sacrality as they were enfolded in neo-paganist practices, the appropriation of East Asian and Indian spiritualities, the widespread promotion of new bodily techniques aimed at well-being and self-awareness, and subject-oriented technologies of all sorts that target the self as an object of optimization (as in Scientology) or of cosmological wisdom (as in New Age movements more generally). These were neo-Durkheimian practices in the sense of elaborating ‘a cult of the individual’.

From the late 1960s through to the early 1990s, the Western sociology of religion was characterized by the parallelism between these two strands of research: the secularization paradigm on the one hand, and the focus on individualization and the ‘spiritual turn’ on the other, both with their own co-imbrications with capitalism. The secularization paradigm, for its part, saw churches as coming under increasing pressure to rationalize their strategies under conditions of overall declining demand. Here, Peter Berger (1967) supplied a well-known study exploring how religious bodies bureaucratized in response to the need to differentiate their products, find ‘market niches’ and so on. Significantly, from the American perspective religion was the quintessential expression and practice of freedom and it was increasingly understood in terms of ‘freedom of choice’ derived from liberal market ideologies.

A neo-Durkheimian age?

Equally influential for current debates were the entanglements of Luckmann’s neo-Durkheimian approach with advanced capitalism. While it was only around the turn of the millennium that sociologists began talking of a ‘Spiritual Revolution’ (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005), some clearly revolutionary features of this program were already visible in the late 1960s. This is especially true for the ways in which new spiritual practices and the communities sustaining them operated outside the existing religious institutions and began to depend on entirely new recruitment mechanisms. Over the decades to follow, we see an emerging and later consolidating ‘spiritual marketplace’ (Roof, 2001) in which emergent forms of sociality and spiritual practice do not follow conventional pathways of institutionalization, including the establishment of criteria for membership. Instead, they continue to exist more or less permanently in and through networks and flows, through constantly ephemeral and evanescent means (Hervieu-Léger, 2000). This is also why these spiritual practices have been seen as the quintessential religious form of postmodernity.

If membership and participation were no longer regulated through hierarchy-based institutions, this also implied that spiritualities were increasingly to be chosen by people acting as consumers. As a consequence, sociologists began to understand neo-Durkheimian practices more and more in terms of consumer society and consumer capitalism. In an important sense, the spiritual revolution unfolds as a key form of advanced commodification for which the dual emancipation of believers from the church as a monopoly institution and of ‘spirituality’ from religion (as exclusively appropriated by the church) were necessary conditions. As a consequence, as Possamai (2003) noted, alternative spiritualities have become part of the cultural logic of late capitalism in that they thrive on the appropriation and consumption of elements from popular culture and history.

Of course, as fundamentally individualist projects, New Age and other forms of post-60s spirituality also resonate with the depoliticizing logic of late capitalism in that they individualize its pathologies and propose individualized solutions to it. In this regard, neo-Durkheimian spiritualities coalesce with the general therapeutic revolution and late capitalism’s therapeutic ethos (Illouz, 2008). Spiritual practices even found their way into penitentiary institutions – hallmarks of sovereign power – where inmates are increasingly offered yoga and meditation classes that have become part of pedagogical imaginaries surrounding rehabilitation (Griera and Clot, 2015). The notion of therapeutization suggests that the contradictions of capitalism are increasingly being defined and interpreted through the hermeneutic of therapy, which again, in its rendition as a product to be purchased in the market, allows for the commodification of the self-same contradictions; in other words, capitalism begins to render productive its own problems and critique in new ways (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1997). This is, of course, ironic as alternative and countercultural movements overwhelmingly aimed to liberate people from capitalism’s chains. Yet eventually their solutions became more symptomatic than subversive of consumer society. This is especially true for self-optimization cults such as Scientology that explicitly see it as their task to make individuals fit to become successful competitors in capitalist markets.

Religions of success, gospels of prosperity

However, some currents within conversionist (neo-)Pentecostalism in Asia (Hefner, 1993), Latin America (Martin, 1990) and Africa (Meyer, 2007) have also drawn on the notions of the market, competition and entrepreneurialism and developed ideologies to consecrate wealth and consumption and apologies of capitalism. Importantly, such religious communities address the lack of wherewithal and promote understandings of religious belief and practice as means to liberate people from the shackles of poverty and misery. However, contrary to the theology of liberation of the Christian base communities that had emerged during the 1970s in many parts of Latin America and Africa, – that is, in societies where Pentecostalism is most triumphant– they do not construe liberation in terms of a collective socialist project. On the contrary, Pentecostal understandings of human improvement as facilitated by the power of the Holy Spirit that one can only access through charisma and prayer inevitably foreground the individual.

While the advances of Pentecostalism in some parts of Latin America and Africa are linked to the powerful support of American evangelical missions, they also respond to particular local articulations of neoliberalism. In some African countries in the 1990s and 2000s, for instance, people witnessed the emergence of a new, small class of individuals endowed with massive conspicuous wealth that they had acquired seemingly out of nowhere. Popular interpretations of the sources of this wealth ranged from corruption to witchcraft. As Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) noted, these occurrences must be understood against the backdrop of structural adjustment measures, imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which dried up state resources and penalized redistributive policies. In some way, people correctly understood that these were magic means that produced spectacular wealth in financial and speculative economies. And it was in the same context that Pentecostal pastors began to morph into ‘pastorpreneurs’ who conspicuously showed off their wealth in order to demonstrate that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, they had been released from poverty, a poverty that had been caused by evil spirits. They also began to demand ‘spontaneous sacrifices’ in terms of massive monetary contributions from followers that would help the latter achieve salvation, in other words: liberation from misery, still in this life, and being born again into a world of success (Burchardt, 2013a; 2013b). These practices consolidated a magic economy based on the notion of getting rich by giving away that has powerful resonances with neoliberal finance and its practice of selling debts (Sassen, 2010).

Challenging secularism

These religious revivals have fed into critiques of classic secularization theory, challenging its alleged universalism, its underlying teleology and evolutionism; and its modernist normative bias (Asad, 2003; Casanova, 1994). Overall, however, these critiques themselves are highly normative. While the secularization paradigm is often considered Eurocentric and anti-religious, recent research generally fashions itself as sympathetic toward religion. Many studies now call forth the impression that there is a ‘natural’ religiosity among populations worldwide, as well as an ideological secularism founded on an alliance between political and academic elites (Bader, 2007; Berger, 1999).

When compared to debates before 1989, recent contributions often engender an inversion of the subject and object of the critique: whereas secularism used to be regarded as a means of liberation from the constraints of traditional and religious authority, religion now appears as a space of freedom, and secularism as an instrument of regimentation and exclusion. The heightened awareness of secularism’s articulation with power relations and knowledge regimes – including in the production of religious forms of subjectivity and expression that are compatible with liberal modernity – leads to one-sidedness when it downplays the autonomy associated with modernity and secularity against moments of domination, and then dismisses them in the name of religious freedom. The triumphalism with which scholars have generally endorsed the new significance and visibility of religion is associated to the symbolic rehabilitation of their research subject and its presumed ability to question social boundaries in new ways. More importantly still, it is associated with the notion that the rehabilitation of religion feeds into new forms of empowerment of the oppressed.

In this context, it seems to me that the contemporary sociological and anthropological critique of power and the state is better understood if viewed less through the angle of its object than its subject. In sociology, critical social theory and research suffered heavily from the end of the Cold War and the end of the socialist dream. While some critical energy was channelled into support for new social movements, especially those of the World Social Forum variety, it was also channelled into support for religious groups constructed as suffering at the hands of an oppressive secularist and undemocratic state that curtails individual and collective freedoms in order to secure sovereign power (Bader, 2007). While within sociological and anthropological discourse and its enthusiasm for religion’s emancipation, state power over religion was increasingly taken for granted, the power of religion over people was largely obliterated as a field of concern. This seems to hold even if we take the critical scholarship on fundamentalism into account. As a critical concept, for many reasons fundamentalism has largely disappeared from scholarly debates, while its most extreme manifestations such as violent religious radicalism, are now mostly dealt outside the realm of religion proper, as terrorism pertaining to the purview of security studies.

As for anthropology, the enthusiasm for religion and its presumed emancipatory potential is linked to the gradual disappearance of tribal communities as anthropology’s long-standing and main object of scholarly advocacy. Tellingly, anthropology’s engagement with religious communities more or less coincides with the rise of globalization, understood in the first instance as the globalization of capitalism and its abstract forms of social organization. Needless to say, processes of globalization were greatly accelerated by the end of the Cold War, as was research into Christian, especially Pentecostal, Islamic, Hindu and other religious communities, which were seen as formulating their own modernities, their own notions of globalization, their own cosmopolitanisms, each time with an emphasis on the local, the particular, the communal. In this vein, so to speak, religion turned in scholarly imagination into a ‘warm place’ in a ‘cold world’ – warm in the sense of community-based. As a consequence, scholars criticized ad nauseam, and denounced as Western, any conceptions of religion that would question the community dimension of religion.

Transnational mobility regimes: Diversity, capital and labour

In contemporary Europe, the most interesting and least researched entanglements of religion and neoliberal capitalism are meanwhile unfolding through pervasive discourses and policies promoting diversity. While initially geared towards a rethinking of the links of disability- and gender-based marginalization and discrimination with migration-driven ethnicity and ethnically based exclusion, in recent years diversity policies have increasingly addressed questions of religion. Importantly, especially cities launch diversity policies to fashion themselves as creative and open, and to attract capital and investment (Schiller, 2015). Diversity has become a key factor in global city rankings. Despite this, it is often forgotten that state and supra-state policies promoting religious diversity are principally inspired not only by concerns over the rights of minorities per se. While anti-discrimination policies are normatively justified by liberal democratic values, an important goal of diversity promotion is not only to respond to but also to make possible the circulation of labour for the greatest benefit of capital, while recognizing that this labour sometimes comes with religious characteristics and needs that must be catered to in order to be incorporated. From this perspective, the political and legal promotion of religious diversity is a by-product of the transnationalization of labour markets.

These economic imperatives underlying religious diversity are accompanied on the one hand by the confluence of diverse culturalized strands of identity politics (European Christian conservative, Islamic), and on the other by the rise of religion as a category of legal protection against discrimination in Western judicial politics, as well as minority rights and human rights discourses more broadly. As claims in the name of religion have acquired greater legitimacy (Koenig, 2005), in religiously-diverse liberal polities people are increasingly incited to understand themselves as religious beings and to construe their participation in society in terms deriving from religious membership. There is a wide range of studies on the increasing presence of religion in public institutions such as prisons, hospitals, the police forces and military (Becci, 2013; Cadge, 2013; Griera and Clot, 2015; Theriault, 2014), for both employees and clients. All of these studies demonstrate how religious diversity became the new paradigm through which this presence is organized. Religious diversity thus incentivizes religious practices and the fashioning of religious identities in public institutions. Significantly, these incentives flow both from the presumed usefulness of religion for purposes of governance and the framing of diversity in terms of market fairness.

The promotion of religious diversity, like diversity regimes more generally, has partially displaced earlier discourses and policies around multiculturalism. In a well-known critique, Slavoj Žižek (1997) argued that multiculturalism was the ideal form of the ideology of global capitalism. He saw multiculturalism as the ‘attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people – as “natives” whose mores are to be carefully studied and “respected”.’ He went on to state that ‘in the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multiculturalism involves patronizing Eurocentric distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own culture’ (Žižek, 1997: 44). In a related critique, Bauman (2011) observed that multiculturalism as a theory of cultural pluralism that postulates the support of liberal tolerance for identities is a conservative force. ‘Its achievement is the transformation of social inequality, a phenomenon highly unlikely to win general approval, into the guise of “cultural diversity”, that is to say, a phenomenon deserving of universal respect and careful cultivation. Through this linguistic measure, the moral ugliness of poverty turns, as if by the touch of a fairy’s wand, into the aesthetic appeal of “cultural diversity”. The fact that any struggle for recognition is doomed to failure so long as it is not supported by the practice of redistribution gets lost from view along the way.’ (Baumen, 2011: 46)

Now, as state institutions and city administrations in immigrant societies recognize cultural diversity, they increasingly address people on the basis of their membership in groups, organized as categories of allegiance. As mentioned, in doing so they increasingly incite people to view themselves and their own form of being in these same terms. There have been trenchant critiques of the essentialisms that accompany these ways of governing people (Bauman, 2011; Joppke, 2004). Other scholars, in turn, have defended multiculturalism against these critiques (Kymlicka, 2013). Yet, as a regime that handles the effects of transnational mobility, diversity is clearly linked to the operations of multinational capital, as Žižek showed.

Conclusions

Why does this matter for the relationship between religion and neoliberal capitalism? I suggest that the rise of religion is in a strong sense the rise of religious identities that should be respected and cultivated within a regime of cultural diversity, and that religious diversity is today perhaps the most powerful articulation of this regime. Beaman (2013) calls this ‘the will to religion’, which should be analysed in terms of ‘obligatory religious citizenship’. In a similar vein, and with particular reference to Islam, Tezcan (2007) notes how religion is increasingly conceptualized as a resource used by liberal governmentality in an effort to secure social order. Such transformations can be observed in the practices of ‘government through community’ (Tezcan, 2007: 59) and the rise of interreligious dialogues, which prefigure the shift from ‘race’ to ‘faith’ and are premised on the construction of a Homo Islamicus of sorts. In order to understand these shifts, which run in parallel to the transformation of ‘community’ from natural spontaneous social units into a mode of governance, it is important to recall their links with the premises of liberal governmentality. ‘Individuals are to be governed through their freedom’, as Rose (1996: 41) noted from a Foucauldian perspective some time ago, ‘but neither as isolated atoms of classical political economy, nor as citizens of society, but as members of heterogeneous communities of allegiance.’

If one wishes to acquire a better understanding of the power and significance of religion today and at the same time reflexively and critically explore the doxa of the construction of religious diversity as a research subject, one should therefore scrutinize the ways in which not only the secular state but religious power itself is implicated in technologies of governmentality in which people are categorized, classified, named and rendered legible through religious diversity.