Challenging the secularist assumption: Religion,public policy and civil service culture

Abstract

The ‘resurgence’ of religion has led scholars and politicians to critique the ‘secularism’ of public policy. Using evidence from interviews with serving policy officials, this article explores the dimensions of ‘secularism’ as they have been applied to the UK policy context and makes two qualifications. First, I suggest that, rather than the ‘structural’ absence of religion in the last decade, often described as ‘marginalisation’ or ‘privatisation’, religion has repeatedly been relocated in relation to policy goals. Second, I challenge the theory of cultural secularisation expressed in terms of the ‘secular orientation’ of the policy making process and argue that cultural resistance to ‘doing religion’ within the permanent civil service cadre is less the result of a secular orientation and more of ‘religion blindness’, an attempt to demonstrate the ‘impartiality’ within which the civil service code requires non-elected officials to operate.

Introduction: Responding to criticism

During its tenure, the Coalition Government ¹ took a variety of steps to respond to criticism about the way religious engagement was undertaken by its predecessors. In June 2011, counter-radicalisation policy ‘Prevent’ was refocussed around known targets and removed from association with integration work. ² Indeed, though the Coalition Government faced accusations of ‘co-opting’ (Ketell, 2012) and ‘marginalising’ (Christians in Parliament, 2012) religion, its attempts at religious engagement tended to emphasise the positive contribution of religion to public policy goals. While considerable attention was paid to the role of religious civil society organisations in the so-called ‘Big Society’ agenda ³ (see Ketell, 2012), in fact a range of central government policy actively engaged religious communities and organisations. The ‘Near Neighbours’ programme, launched by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles in November 2011, aimed to increase interfaith and intercultural cooperation in improving local neighbourhoods. Administered through the Church Urban Fund, this programme explicitly placed a strong emphasis on the ‘vital role’ played by faith groups in local communities. ⁴ The conviction that religion plays an important role in society was further underlined by the publication of ‘Faith Partnership Principles’ by the Department for International Development in February 2012 ⁵ which ‘marks a new era of understanding between government and faith groups on global development’.

Indeed, Ministerial rhetoric suggests that these initiatives were part of a conscious shift toward ‘doing God’ (Pickles, 2012). On a number of occasions, the UK’s Christian foundations were reasserted ⁶ and historic policies of multiculturalism criticised ⁷ . On the other hand, Ministers have also accused previous Governments of ‘secularism ⁸ .

Seeking to fill a gap in the literature (the religion-bureaucracy nexus) and to assess the accuracy of the accusation that Government in the UK is ‘secular’, I undertook a series of interviews with serving officials in a range of government departments. Participants were selected based on a combination of ‘cherry-picking’ and ‘snowball sampling’ (see Morgan, 2008: 816–817). While this approach can result in an unrepresentative data sample, given it is necessarily driven by existing contacts and relationships, in fact, it represented the most appropriate, if not only, way for me to access a small, and nascent Whitehall sub-community. Semi-structured interviews enabled me to ensure a degree of structure and consistency in the interview process, while also guaranteeing the necessary flexibility. While I only make explicit reference to 11 of my interview subjects in this article, the arguments I am presenting here are supported by evidence gathered during the majority of the interviews. Those interviews not represented did not contain contradictory data, rather they did not cover relevant ground.

Broadly speaking, I asked questions pertaining to the interview subject’s own experience which fell into three categories: conceptualisation (what is the relationship between religion and foreign policy? is religion a (foreign) policy issue?), capacity (how often do you utilise external research? are there any religion specialists in your department?) and culture (do you consider there to be a department or organisational culture? what is the cultural make-up of your department?). Interviewees were all asked questions from the same set though interviews varied in the number and type of questions asked. Interviews ranged between 30 and 120 minutes, though most were at the shorter end. Notes (not full transcriptions) of each interview were taken and sent for clearance to my interview subjects. Though very few made comments, those who did often slightly ‘watered down’ their language or edited out particularly direct comments. While frustrating, I found that this rarely affected the overall message of the interview nor did it compromise my research in any way. Once I had a full set of approved interview notes, I set about extracting pertinent comments and then used a simplified coding based on the interview questions. Out of this coding emerged a range of key themes, including cultural observations and the shaping of institutional responses to religion that are contained in this article. Most importantly, for this article, in the course of these interviews it emerged that there was a cleavage between what happened at the structural or institutional level and what was going on culturally among civil servants. This distinction – and recognition that these two parts make up a coherent whole – forms the basis of this article.

Interestingly, my interviews also revealed the extent to which officials were conscious of various ways in which the Government had made mistakes on religion in the past. As a result, officials explained, there were perennial concerns about ‘getting religion wrong’, ‘causing offence’ or engaging with ‘inappropriate organisations’ (HMG/c (3 July 2012), HMG/d (4 July 2012), HMG/e (4 July 2012), HMG/f (4 July 2012), HMG/g (5 July 2012)). A number suggested to me that high profile errors in the past meant that ‘religion is not a comfortable space’ (HMG/f) for policy-makers, that Government ‘culture is to be embarrassed about religion’ (HMG/c) and that religion is considered as a policy issue only by exception (HMG/b (10 May 2012)). As one official explained to me ‘There are areas where engagement with religion is discretionary and areas where it is non-discretionary. The majority of my work has been where religion really has affected us and we have been forced to deal with it … but we have not been particularly successful in dealing with it because we don’t have much practice’ (HMG/f). That said, a number of officials did acknowledge that lessons had been learned from the past and were able to utilise major narratives drawn from the social and political sciences to explain contemporary practice. For example, a number of those interviewed described increasing recognition of the exceptionalism of the British and/or European church-state settlement (Berger et al., 2008), suggesting that ‘The desire to separate (religion from politics) is European and particularly British’ (HMG/c) and ‘we are only just starting to realise that our settled view of the world is otherwise’ (HMG/f). This expression is characteristically ‘post-secular’ (Habermas, 2008) in that it recognises the cultural contingency of the Western model which separates religion from politics. In addition, officials described the changing ‘mood music’ (HMG/l (27 July 2012)) within Government departments in which there were increasing signs that ‘it’s OK to be open about religious motivation’ (HMG/k (5 July 2012). As one explained to me, ‘the key question is whether the public space can only be secular or because we have a pluralistic system do you allow all voices to shout all the time. We now allow all the voices’ (HMG/i (5 July 2012)). Government policy, rhetoric and practice then, seem to have been responding to critiques of the ‘secularism’ of the public sphere by actively providing space for religion within it. But what if the extent of this ‘secularism’ has been overstated?

In this article, I explore the two dimensions of ‘secularism’ as they have been applied to the UK policy context, distinguishing between two different narratives which are often conflated. First, I suggest it is necessary to distinguish between ‘structural’ and ‘cultural’ dimensions of UK Government – that is between the ‘management’ of religion and the religious complexion of those doing the ‘managing’. I argue that the last 15 years has been characterised by considerable structural change in the relationship between religion and public policy in the UK but that this is better described as ‘relocation’ than ‘marginalisation’ or ‘secularism’. What emerges – far from ‘secularism’ – is a pattern of increased attention being paid to religion by central government departments. Next I turn to the Whitehall managers themselves, evaluating the extent to which the accusation of ‘cultural secularism’ is appropriate. Here, I distinguish between the political and administrative levels of government, suggesting that it is within the permanent administrative cadre that aversion to religious engagement is strongest. However, I suggest there is not a civil service wide ‘culture’ of secularism but instead a commitment to ideological impartiality which I call ‘religion blindness’. Finally, I explore the implications of this ‘religion blindness’ for both the policy community and the academy.

Marginalisation or relocation?

Former Communities Secretary Eric Pickles (2012) claimed that ‘long-standing British liberties of freedom of religion have been undermined in recent years by aggressive secularism, especially in the more politically correct parts of the public sector’. Critical of high profile legal disputes over the right to religious expression, including over the right to wear or display religious symbols in a working environment, Pickles explicitly criticizes the National Secular Society’s campaign against council prayers as ‘intolerant’. What is more, he has advocated the right of religious groups (and Christians in particular) to ‘be heard by policy makers’.

The notion that public policy is inappropriately secular was expressed by another senior politician, Baroness Warsi (2012) who, also writing in The Telegraph, claimed that religion has been ‘side-lined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere’. She describes this tendency as ‘militant secularism’, such urgent language reflects her fear that this ‘rising tide’ is ‘taking hold of our societies’. Like Pickles, Warsi highlighted what she considered to be visible signs of encroaching secularism including the prohibition of the display of religious symbols and considers the ethos of secularism to be intolerant ‘when it requires the complete removal of faith from the public sphere’. What Warsi and Pickles have both highlighted (and condemned), then, is what they perceived to be the deep secularism of the public sector and its implications for the limiting of free religious expression. Sociological accounts of secularism might describe this removal of religion from public life as the ‘privatisation’ of religion – a structural form of secularisation characterised by the differentiation and the ‘emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science – from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere’ (Casanova, 1994: 19). However, I would suggest that a variety of historical public policy actually reflects the conscious engagement of religious communities and organisations.

The so-called ‘Rushdie affair’ is often identified as a watershed moment in the relationship between religion and British society. The reaction of Muslim communities in parts of the UK to the publication of a novel labelled blasphemous, according to Herbert (2003), had the effect of politicising urban Muslim youth in the UK and creating a nascent South Asian-facing Islamic civil society in Britain. While the most significant policy outcome of the Rushdie affair was the eventual inclusion of ‘religion’ in anti-discrimination legislation, making religion a defining category of difference according to British law, I would suggest that it also set a precedent for the subsequent development of the religion-public policy relationship in the UK: policies of multiculturalism, community cohesion, what I label ‘heritage Christianity’ and, controversially, security, are all attempts by the policy community to galvanise the socially cohesive potential of religion in the face of problematic intercultural relations. In other words, by repeatedly ‘relocating’ religion as a policy issue, the policy community has sought to ape exactly the effect the Rushdie affair created: the political mobilisation of religious communities in a thriving ‘civil society’, with mixed results.

In the midst of debate and policy making about the ‘race problem’, brought to a head by the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the development of a Home Office ‘faith unit’ was Jack Straw’s response to what he recognised were religious tensions within his own Blackburn constituency (HMG/a (22 May 2011)). When Blunkett succeeded him as Home Secretary, after the 2001 election, civil unrest in ‘multicultural’ northern cities resulted in an increased focus on citizenship and integration – the government was increasingly engaged in the ‘management of diversity’. Back et al. (2002) have well argued that New Labour’s policy was necessarily Janus-faced, struggling at once with the promotion of tolerance and diversity and the challenge of coherent national politics. The label ‘faith’, I would suggest, was a critical part of their early attempt to overcome this tension, at least as far as dealing with religious communities was concerned. While citizenship – by 2005, a status to be achieved via examination – continued to be an individual, legal matter, a rational contractual relationship between the individual and the state, ‘faith’ was increasingly recognised, even encouraged, as a source of local and communal identity. In a flagship education policy, the Blair government sought to encourage the establishment of ‘faith schools’ within the state sector. Though the idea of the ‘faith school’ was not new, its application beyond the Judaeo-Christian norm, a reflection of the reality of cultural diversity, certainly was. The ‘faith schools’ initiative encouraged the expression of religious identity in ways which were compatible with both existing structures and national education priorities. Through this and the new attention being paid to ‘community cohesion’, ⁹ then, the Blair Government’s domestic policy narrative – far from ‘ignoring’ or ‘marginalising’ religion, located it in a localised context. As a result, the Government of the time presided over a paradox in its policy on religion: diverse ‘faith’ identities were supported, encouraged and welcomed into public life in communities, but the resulting diversity, and potential conflicts arising from it, required management at national level via citizenship tests and anti-discrimination legislation.

While 9/11 brought religion, terrorism and security to the forefront of both the policy and academic agendas, the events of 7 July 2005 challenged the relationship between religion and public policy in the UK most profoundly. The sort of distinctions between ‘private’ religious and ‘public’ national identity could no longer be sustained, nor could the inconsistent local, national and international policy on religion. The possibility of ‘home grown’ terrorists, gave rise to an overt ‘counter-radicalisation’ agenda in counter-terrorist work: the publication of CONTEST in March 2006 turned what had been internal counter-terrorism planning into an official cross-government strategy and the establishment of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT) in 2007 made counter-terrorism a strategic priority across government, eroding not only internal boundaries between departments but also symbolically those between local, national and international policy. This emphasis on counter-terrorism was only underlined further by the new Brown administration who, distancing themselves from the failures of ‘ethical foreign policy’, embraced the idea of national security as ‘the first duty of government’. The publication of two national security strategies in quick succession (HM Government 2008, 2009), establishment of a National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office and application of national security policies across a range of departments, to some extent, brought greater coherence to local, national and international policy on religion. ¹⁰ Counter-terrorism and national security strategies increasingly recognised the interconnectedness of ‘home and away’: UK foreign policy was recognised as a potential source of radicalisation at home, just as local disputes in British communities mirrored major international conflicts and tensions. Thus, the distinction between local, national and international which was so apparent in the early years of New Labour was gradually disappearing, but greater coherence between these levels was the result of another critical shift: the emphasis on religion as a potential threat to UK security. The 2009 UK National Security Strategy (HMG, 2009) explicitly acknowledged ‘ideologies and beliefs’ as potential drivers of insecurity around the world. Similarly, ‘Prevent’ policy involved increasing engagement with Muslim communities through policing and local government, leading to accusations of ‘spying’ and the perception that Prevent work was both counter-productive and stigmatizing (House Of Commons, 2010).

While counter-terrorism dominated the policy agenda, the Brown government also placed a renewed emphasis on localism – establishing a department for Communities and Local Government and devolving to local authorities a number of key delivery responsibilities, including Prevent and community cohesion. As Chapman (2008: 38) explains, ‘local communities would become agents of certain socially desirable goals’. Brown and successive communities secretaries Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears presented a strong case for the role that thriving, diverse communities could play in the life of the nation. Religious voluntary organisations, of course, played their part in this – just as they were increasingly recognised as useful proxies for overseas development – but in both cases, the relationship between policy and religion was an instrumental one. Thus local authorities were measured by nationalised targets, the Prime Minister continued to emphasise national values as integrative (including intensified prioritisation of national security). It seems, then, that the Brown administration increased the coherence of its policy position vis- à-vis religion at local, national and international levels via the national security narrative – thus while religion was celebrated and utilised locally, it was construed primarily as one of the problematic side-effects of globalisation. Far from an absence of religion-related policy, then, the New Labour years were characterised by the repeated relocation of religion as a public policy issue and, I would suggest, this pattern continues. Not only were many Coalition policies descendants of their New Labour predecessors (HMG/j, HMG/k), ¹¹ it seems that religion was again relocated as a public policy issue.

By emphasising Christianity’s cultural contribution to the UK, senior politicians portray religion as something which is identifiable with ‘being British’. Whereas under Gordon Brown, Britishness and national values were emphasised as a means of superseding religious diversity, here we see specific historical religious values enlisted in service of national identity. Religion, then, existed in a different – relocated – position in relation to policy: the cultural role of religion being embraced was almost entirely absent from New Labour policy which instead recognised religious diversity and complexity. The repeated ‘relocation’ rather than marginalisation of religion by politicians over the last 15 years challenges accounts of the structural secularism or ‘privatisation’ of religion in the UK public policy environment. Indeed, although often lacking both coordination and capacity, officials described provision made by central government departments for the engagement of faith communities since the millennium (HMG/k). Others (Dinham, 2012; Macey and Carling, 2011) too have noted the increasingly close attention paid to religion by Whitehall departments in recent years. In many cases this provision has included the direct funding of faith-based organisations and/or their utilisation in the provision of public services. The last twenty years, then, has been characterised not by secularism but by the increasing management of religion by public policy makers. As a result, it is necessary to shift the focus of our enquiry into public sector secularism away from the structural level toward the cultural. To what extent is there a secular orientation among policy makers? In what follows, I explore the way civil servants approach religious issues and dynamics. I suggest that, contrary to the structural level which has been characterised by change (increasing attention being paid to religion), at the cultural level there has been considerable continuity expressed in terms of the Civil Service Code and a commitment to impartiality manifest in ‘religion blindness’ as a way of approaching policy issues.

A secular orientation?

Gutkowski (2012: 88) has undertaken research into the UK defence and security community and argues that a ‘secular habitus’ has emerged since the 1960s which has ‘influenced the way senior British policy-makers, officers, and security professionals imagined and conducted the wars on terror, particularly up to 2008’. She argues that the boundaries of secularism in Britain have developed in relation to key political concepts like multiculturalism, democracy, tolerance, national identity, extremism, terrorism and insurgency and that ‘these habits are not confined to this group (policy-makers) but are embedded within the embodied practices, assumptions, and aesthetics of the metropolitan middle classes’ (Gutkowski, 2012: 89). Chapman (2008: 3) too has examined what he calls the ‘secular activity of the formulation of public policy’. He draws similar conclusions – notably that a secular orientation has shaped public policy in determinative ways but that this orientation is not limited to the policy community, but extends particularly to the media who made it clear that Tony Blair’s public religiosity was ‘a high-risk strategy: as portrayed in the media, religion evidently seriously clouded judgement’ (Chapman, 2008:12) But analyses of the public policy’s secularism are not limited to the immediate past or to the New Labour government.

Long before the events of 9/11 and 7/7 brought religion to the forefront of public policy attention, Gavin D’Costa (1990: 418) examined the Satanic Verses controversy, suggesting that ‘Britain’s prized tolerant and pluralist society began to exhibit the power of its master code from the beginning of 1989’. D’Costa (1990: 419) labels this master code ‘secular fundamentalism’, describing it as ‘a secular metaphysics with its attendant political and social baggage’ and claims that the inability of author Salman Rushdie, the press and policy makers to understand the backlash against this ‘blasphemous text’ is characteristic of European secular modernism and the ‘latent plausibility structure’ of our conduct drawn from the Enlightenment which fails to recognise religious identity as first-order (D’Costa, 1990: 423–424).

Analysis of the sort undertaken by Gutkowski, Chapman and D’Costa highlights a different dimension of secularism than that expressed in the critiques of Warsi and Pickles. While the latter emphasise the impact of the secular ethos on the expression of personal religious identity, the former suggest the ways in which this ethos has influenced and shaped policy makers’ conception of events and hence policy responses to these events. In this, they have much in common with the work of Asad (2003) and Hurd (2011), both of whom articulate a vision of ‘secularism’ as a Western political doctrine: it is, says Hurd (2011:60) ‘a series of political settlements that define, regulate, and manage religion in modern politics, including international politics’.

This argument is given weight by the nature of the two-tier system of UK Government ¹² in which attention paid to religion by elected politicians can be ‘neutralised’ by the bureaucratic system. Since leaving office, former Prime Minister Tony Blair described the internal reaction to his suggestion that he finish an address announcing the beginning of military intervention in Iraq by saying ‘God Bless Britain’. It ‘caused consternation in the whole system. A committee was convened, and we had to discuss it. I remember we had this debate on and off but finally one of the civil servants said in a very po-faced way “I must remind you Prime Minister, this is not America” in this disapproving tone, so I gave up the idea’. ¹³ This anecdote suggests an institutional intolerance of religion within the administrative tier of the UK Government. It seems sensible, then, to make a distinction between politicians and the ‘Government’ as a bureaucratic whole when it comes to the culture of ‘secularism’. Indeed, in interviews, a number of officials made a similar distinction. One explained to me that ‘Ministers are more likely to be overtly religious in talking about policy’ (HMG/f), while another suggested ‘officials are very different to Ministerial level where ideological views are necessarily part of work and may form the basis of decisions’ (HMG/f). Although Chapman, Gutkowski and D’Costa all point to a unifying ‘secularism’ which characterises the policy-making process, it seems to be the permanent administrative system which meets this description. Yet, evidence from my own interviews suggests that, while there are strong cultural values shaping engagement with religious issues, dynamics and communities, these values are less an expression of a secular orientation and more a commitment to impartiality.

While there is insufficient data to measure the religious complexion of the civil service, evidence I gathered from interviews would seem to suggest that the overall population more closely mirrors that in the UK than we might expect. A number of officials discussed their own personal religious commitments and/or backgrounds, though many suggested that these were likely unknown by colleagues. The principle, I would suggest, is less ‘secularist’ and more ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and even this is changing, as one official explained ‘in the last 10 years, there is a more noticeable number of religious people … you might say more people are ‘out’ (HMG/i (5 July 2012). In fact, many officials shared similar anecdotal evidence of the religious commitments of colleagues, acknowledging ‘strong black Christian, white Christian and noticeable Muslim (communities)’ in one domestic department (HMG/i) as well as the fact that ‘most major religions have a network’ (HMG/h (5 July 2012). In fact, one official suggested ‘the civil service shouldn’t be considered secular. There are lots of very religious people … even powerful senior civil servants … [but they] don’t wear it on their sleeves’ (HMG/g). Indeed, most officials (whether they identified as ‘religious’ or not) made the distinction between professional and religious identities. While it is possible to ‘be’ both religious and a policy adviser or analyst, and while officials are permitted to perform religious rituals in a ‘modern workplace’ otherwise leaving religion at the office door was considered an entirely appropriate modus operandi by both religious and non-religious individuals. One official explained this as ‘an internal cultural norm of assuming it’s private … it’s parked in the same box as sexuality’ (HMG/f), while another suggested that he had witnessed ‘no noticeable impact on policy from religion’ (HMG/i).

On one hand, it seems, the civil service is a reasonably pluralistic environment in which individuals with a variety of religious affiliations and commitments (and none) are employed. And yet, on the other, officials were at pains to emphasise that distance between these affiliations and professional responsibilities were maintained. This was equally true for one official who regularly attends Church as another who was described by colleagues as a ‘secularist’. In this way, I would suggest, policy officials act neither out of an explicitly ‘religious’ nor an explicitly ‘secular’ worldview but according to a set of internal cultural values which are strongly felt. These values almost certainly include a combination of pragmatism and utilitarianism – the characteristics of technocratic governance – as one official pointed out: ‘civil servants are very good at only focussing their efforts where required’ (HMG/b) and another suggested that ‘the civil service is a self-selecting elite which thinks utilitarian’(HMG/f). There is a sense, then, that policy officials operate within certain cultural constraints which may impact upon their ability to recognise or engage with ‘religion’. However, it should not be assumed that this is a ‘secularist’ culture.

Secularism or impartiality?

Since the mid-19th century, there has been in the UK a permanent cadre of officials, independent of the governing party who are appointed and promoted on merit and advise and assist the politically elected government of the day. This official cadre operate in accordance with the civil service code ¹⁴ which requires them to act with integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. I suggest that these core values – and particularly the required commitment to impartiality – are pertinent to a discussion of public sector ‘secularism’.

According to the code, two types of impartiality are required of civil servants. The first – political impartiality – requires civil servants to serve an elected government of any persuasion to the best of their ability and includes restrictions on personal involvement in political activities. There is, though, a second and more general requirement for ‘impartiality’ which requires civil servants to act ‘in a way that is fair and just and equitable and reflects the Civil Service commitment to equality and diversity’. Specifically, Civil Servants must not ‘unjustifiably favour or discriminate against particular individuals or interests’. It is possible that the conflation of these two types of impartiality has created a conviction among officials to avoid identifying with or engaging with any set of value convictions, including those considered ‘religious’. The association of required ‘impartiality’ with the avoidance of religion, I would suggest, better explains the cultural resistance to engagement with ‘religion’ than does the accusation of secularism which implies less ideological impartiality and more an ideological commitment to church/state separation which is far from what I found during my interviews.

Indeed, if colour blindness is the philosophical position which ignores racial and ethnic differences between people thereby being ‘blind’ to their colour, then ‘religion blindness‘ is a conscious or unconscious attempt to ignore religious differences, which I would argue is the result of an extended commitment to ideological impartiality. Being ‘religion blind‘ is less a description of ignorance about the ‘content’ or ‘nature’ of religion(s) – what has often been called a lack of ‘religious literacy’ (Dinham et al., 2009) – and more an inability to recognise when and where religion influences actors, orientates societies and informs worldviews. Just as critics of ‘colour blindness’ as a policy position note (Loury, 2004), blindness to difference at the same time denies it significance – and this is the very position in which Her Majesty’s Government finds itself. This blindness shapes policy makers’ engagements with religious actors and dynamics in an equal but opposite motion to the sort of ‘equalities’ approach to religion described by Beckford (2012), and called the ‘juridification’ of religion by Sandberg (2011). While the introduction of religion as a protected characteristic in equalities legislation has created a requirement for the public sector to engage with all religious communities and to engage with them in a fair and equal way, the civil service commitment to ideological impartiality has resulted in an avoidance of religion.

In the current era, there is a clamour to identify and describe cultures of ‘secularism’, ¹⁵ both at home and overseas (Cady and Shakman Hurd, 2010) particularly in relation to public policy, there is a need to interrogate and challenge these accounts and to problematise – as well as utilise – the category ‘the secular’. In particular, this research suggests that there may be value in broadly ethnographic approaches to ‘secular’ cultures, particularly institutional cultures. More urgent is the challenge facing policy makers to develop appropriate policy responses in an era of global religious resurgence (Berger, 1999). Rather than the sort of ‘religionisation’ of public policy described by Ivanescu (2010) in the Dutch context or a switch to the perceived overt religiosity in the US system, ¹⁶ a ‘religion attentive’ approach might focus less on structural change, or introducing religious actors into the policy making process, and more on creating the right institutional culture for understanding, interpreting and engaging with religious dynamics among policy makers.