Religious urbanism in Singapore: Competition,commercialism and compromise in the search for space

Abstract

This article explores the recursive relationship between religious praxis and urban environments. It advances the concept of ‘religious urbanism’ to show how urban environments play an active role in shaping the praxis of religion, and how religious groups adopt secular logics in response to the pressures of urban environments. Such logics have given rise to new, more pragmatic forms of spatial reproduction that lead to the desecularisation of space. Desecularisation involves religious groups diminishing the secular properties of space, rather than attempting to achieve any lasting notion of sacredness. Drawing on the restrictive religio-spatial context of Singapore, I demonstrate how fast-growing religious groups are forced to compete, commercialise, and compromise in order to acquire space. Combined, these factors have come to define religious urbanism in Singapore, and highlight the gulf between the planning and praxis of religion in urban environments.

Introduction

Urban environments place unique stresses and strains on religious praxis. Far from being passive backdrops, they play an active role in forming and shaping the presence and performance of religion and religiosity. Religion in/and the urban should therefore be conceived as mutually constitutive categories, which are strengthened through their associations with, and responses to, each other. The neoliberal logics that govern access to and use of urban space encourage new, often alternative, forms of religious organisation and expression. These forms ‘challenge the taken-for-granted uses and spatial structures of the urban context’ (Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri, 2014: 646) and reveal how religion reproduces space and how place reproduces religion. Taking the critiques that ‘many studies hold an underlying assumption of the rigid distinction between “sacred” and “secular” agents’ (Chen, 2017: 531) and that religion ‘is still employed as a default point of entry into inquiries on sacred, spiritual and religious spatialities’ (Qian and Kong, 2017a: 2, original emphasis) as points of departure, this article builds on Qian and Kong’s call for religion to be understood as a hybrid category that is responsive to, and shaped by, the specific contexts in which it is applied. Specifically, it develops the concept of ‘religious urbanism’ to highlight the recursive relationship between religion and the urban environment of Singapore.

Religious urbanism explores the ways in which space is appropriated, negotiated, and contested by religious groups in urban environments, and, in turn, how religious groups ‘refashion and re-invent themselves by appropriating rationalities, values and logics normally defined as “secular”’ (Qian and Kong, 2017a: 1) into their organisational ontologies and practices. While research has unravelled the interplay between religion in/and secular space, the fact remains that ‘some of the richest insights into contemporary religious life are to be found outside formal congregations, away from religious buildings, and in perhaps the most “unlikely” secular institutions’ (Gilliat-Ray, 2005: 368). Recent work on ‘urban religion’ recognises the fact that many religious groups are forced to operate within the ‘unofficially sacred’ spaces of the city (Kong, 2001) and has explored the urban as a ‘site of converging and conflicting visions and voices, practices and orientations’ (Orsi, 1999: 281). Notwithstanding the value of such work in embracing the ‘re-emergence of religion and its ample spatial manifestations’ (Luz, 2015: 278), the unique challenges posed by urban space – and the responses of religious groups to such challenges – remain undertheorised. The understanding of religious urbanism advanced by this article thus encapsulates the new forms of religion – and the new forms of religious spatiality – taking root in urban environments around the world.

This article is split into three sections. The first introduces religious urbanism in modernity, the second shows how religious urbanism is often associated with the desecularisation of space, and the third applies these ideas to Singapore. The third section weaves existing understandings of religious space in Singapore (e.g. Heng, 2016; Kong, 1992, 1993, 2002; Woods, 2018) with more recent insights gleaned from Singapore’s foremost media outlet, The Straits Times. I used the Factiva database to search the The Straits Times for articles related to religion and space (140 articles), and religion and the regulation of space (21). While the empirical data presented below are a much-refined subset of the data collected, they focus on cases that are indicative of the broader religio-spatial dynamics at play in Singapore.

Religious urbanism in modernity

Religion exists in a state of uneasy symbiosis with urban environments around the world. Urban environments place restrictions on the access to and usage of space, with the logic of the market reflecting the long-held assumption that urban environments are mostly inimical to religious praxis. This has guided the development of academic inquiry, with recent criticisms pointing to the fact that ‘one of the persistently stubborn assumptions of much of recent urban theory and policy seems to be that religion is external, incidental or peripheral to the discussion of urban modernity’ (Hancock and Srinivas, 2008: 620). While research has tended to treat the ‘religious’ and ‘urbanism’ as distinct categories, they are in fact co-constitutive, with the religious inflecting upon the urban, and vice versa. ‘Religious urbanism’ is a concept that advances this more integrated perspective. As much as religious urbanism embraces the mutually constitutive nature of the religious and the urban, so too does it embrace the recursive relationship between the religious and the secular; one wherein ‘the relationship between secularization and sacralization is not a matter of “either/or” but instead one of “both/and”’ (Chen, 2017: 534). Religious urbanism heralds the resilience of religion in its ability to adapt to the secular hegemony of the urban environment.

Urban environments challenge the praxis of religion and thus provide opportunities for religion to be reinvented. The challenges of urban space encourage religion to become more reflexive, with research showing how religious groups use urban spaces in flexible, transgressive, and informal ways. ‘Informality’ involves the multiple and overlapping uses of space by different actors and results in the layering of urban forms. Layering can take both physical (the ways in which space is used) and metaphorical (the meanings ascribed by stakeholders) forms. The urban environment is one in which spaces are expected to oscillate between different uses and meanings, providing minority (and/or marginalised) groups opportunities to subvert the hegemony of top-down state planning. Thus, ‘far from withering away, religious spaces and practices have acquired heightened visibility in these settings … [and have led to] the creation of new publics and counter-publics, and religious subjectivities and practices’ (Hancock and Srinivas, 2008: 620). Religious urbanism gives rise to new spatial forms that blend the religious and the secular and speaks to work on ‘infrasecular’ spaces.

Infrasecular and desecular urban spaces

In recent decades, research has explored the ways in which religious groups attribute meaning to places and, through processes of sacralisation, create sacred spaces. This focus has been compounded by the fact that in many Western contexts, secularisation has presented ‘new problems and opportunities, restrictions and openings to religion in advanced differentiated societies’, with secular spaces being ‘left open for sacralization in countless ways’ (Wilford, 2010: 343). Reflecting the fact that processes of sacralisation are varied, there has been criticism of the assumptions upon which exploration of the ‘religious’ is based. Specifically, Gökariksel (2009: 657–658) laments the tendency for religion to be researched as a category that is distinct from the secular, which has ‘limited exploration of the relationship between the religious and the secular, as well as of the presence and effects of religion beyond the “officially sacred”’. Compounding this is recognition that in many urban environments, religion is often disconnected from the officially sacred spaces of the church, mosque, temple, and so on. Indeed, the fact that ‘it is very rare … [that such “unofficially sacred” spaces] have any historical, theological or territorial significance’ (Gilliat-Ray, 2005: 364) foregrounds the need to identify alternative strategies of spatial reproduction.

Recognising the various methods and effects involved in the sacralisation of space, and the need for more nuanced understandings of religion, research has begun to consider the fact that any process – whether of profanation or sacralisation – is impermanent. For example, Tse (2014) argues that profane space provides the bedrock upon which sacred space is constructed, suggesting that there is what Finlayson (2017) describes as ‘fluidity’ to the sacralisation of space. Building on the idea of spatio-temporal impermanence and the fluidity of both sacred and profane spaces, Della Dora (2018: 2) has coined the term ‘infrasecular’ to guide exploration of ‘the fluidity of the boundaries between sacred and secular, or rather, on the complex coexistences and intersections between the two’. Infrasecular spaces of religion embrace the multi-layered nature of space and help to explore the effects of ‘contemporaneous cohabitation and competition between multiple forms of belief and non-belief’ (Della Dora, 2018: 2). They encourage us to think about the sacred and the secular as two nodes on the spectrum of spatiality, with space being reproduced in response to various negotiations.

When the notion of infrasecular space is applied to the urban environment, such negotiations become more strongly contested, and more short-lived. Thus, the spatial manifestations of religious urbanism are less about sacralising space, and more about its desecularisation. Sacralisation comes with an assumption of distinction; of substantive difference from the secular or profane space that comes before and after religious appropriation. In recognising that ‘many of the human techniques of sacralisation are less possible where the space is shared’ (Gilliat-Ray, 2005: 357), desecularisation is more about pragmatism, compromise, and utility, and much less about the recreation of sanctity. Desecularisation is an attempt to diminish the secular properties of space, but not necessarily to render it ‘sacred’; it renders space suitable for the (religious) function that it serves, but does not necessarily to imbue it with any notion of sacredness. In this sense, the desecularisation of space is a response to what Qian and Kong (2017b: 2) call ‘secular universalism’ – the ‘prioritization of market-based rational logics over other values, including religious ones’. It is a process whereby ‘ostensibly secular spaces … are appropriated by religious groups in order to achieve a religious objective or outcome’ (Kong and Woods, 2016: 116), leading to the manifestation of agentic, ‘quasi-secular’ spaces that are often more secular than sacred.

Religious urbanism in Singapore

The city-state of Singapore is defined by its small size, its authoritarian government, and its diverse population. Religious pluralism has caused the state to adopt a secular approach to the management of religion. Such an approach is based on the principle of ‘equidistance’ whereby all recognised religious groups are treated equally. This principle extends to all aspect of religious praxis, including the allocation of land. Since the passing of the Planning Act in 1960, land for religious (and all other) purposes has been clearly zoned and demarcated. Such a controlled regulatory context draws on the ‘rational’ urban planning principles of ‘efficiency’, ‘pragmatism’, and ‘orderly growth’ (Kong, 2002: 1576) to accommodate the competing interests of different groups – both religious and secular. This has resulted in a situation whereby the ‘officially sacred’ spaces of Singapore are those ‘sanctioned and approved by secular forces, particularly the state, as being sacred’ (Heng, 2016: 217). The forms of ‘sacredness’ imbued by religious spaces in Singapore – and the methods of sacralisation therein – can be interpreted as a function of the secular allocation of land. Kong (1993: 41) describes the state’s position towards religious space as ‘ideologically hegemonic’, which

den[ies] the meaningfulness of religious buildings to ordinary individuals. Even when these buildings are clearly invested with sacred meaning and intense personal attachments, they are treated as no different from other buildings, and attempts are made to persuade people of this ‘truth’.

This ‘truth’ underpins the possible sacralisation of space in Singapore and defines its unique form of religious urbanism. In response to the ideologically hegemonic position of the state, religious groups have explored ‘ways in which to resist and/or adapt these [planning] policies’ (Heng, 2016: 218). When land for religious purposes cannot be appropriated through formal channels, alternative strategies have been adopted to establish and maintain a physical presence. Often, this involves locating religious praxis within the informal domain of non-religious spaces, resulting in situations whereby religious groups are forced to ‘temporarily diminish the importance of physical location’ (Heng, 2016: 216, emphasis added) in favour of having a physical location. In response to the strict regulatory framework, the spaces created by religious groups are often, therefore, more desecularised than they are sacralised. The following subsections discuss these processes in more detail. Throughout, I refer to the ‘placeless’ religious groups that operate outside the prescriptions of government planning; that is, those that do not have access to land that has been zoned for religious purposes.

The competition for space

According to Kong and Woods (2016), there are four ways in which religious groups compete for space: inter-religious competition (competition between religious groups of different religions), intra-religious competition (between different religious groups of the same religion), religious-secular competition (between religious and secular groups), and religion-state competition (between religious groups and the state). Given the hegemony of the state in apportioning land for religious groups in Singapore, only the first three forms of competition are relevant. Parcels of land are set aside by the state for the establishment of new religious buildings, and are put up for tender by groups of the same religion (Kong, 1993). By restricting each parcel of land to just one religion, the state plays an active role in encouraging intra-religious competition while minimising inter-religious competition. This policy of ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Ophir et al., 2009) serves to accommodate all religions, but does so within a framework of severely limited land supply. Intra-religious competition has been most acutely felt among Christian groups, whose speed of growth has brought about an impasse between the demand for, and supply of, land. Between 2000 and 2010, the size of the Christian population nearly doubled, from 588,000 to 930,000, yet only two plots of church land were released for bidding between 2005 and 2010 (The Straits Times, 2010).

This impasse has caused Christian groups – especially younger organisations that are fast-growing but with limited resources – to operate within secular spaces. In turn, this has caused them to compete with secular agencies (including businesses, and the public) for spaces in cinemas, hotels, shopping centres, country clubs, and factories and provides an alternative pathway to growth that has been successfully exploited by some of Singapore’s largest megachurches. For example, since forming in 1983, New Creation Church (NCC) has outgrown 10 different venues, and, as of 2010, had a congregation of 20,000. To accommodate its size, in 1999 it moved to a rented auditorium in Suntec City – a mixed-use convention and exhibition centre, shopping centre, and office development in the downtown area of Singapore – eventually conducting four services every Sunday while simultaneously broadcasting each service to six other venues (The Straits Times, 2010). Yet, while secular space provides a channel through which fast-growing Christian groups can grow outside of the putative restrictions of the state, Christian groups have also had to adopt their organisational structures to suit the neoliberal logics of operating within secular marketplaces. This has brought about a commercialisation of religious praxis in Singapore.

The commercialisation of religious praxis

The encroachment of religious groups into secular spaces has various consequences, one of which is the need to accommodate the costs of having to pay high rents and to manage the logistical complexity of spatial impermanence. Thus, as much as secular space provides a spatial alternative, so too does it come with a higher price tag. This has brought about a commercialisation of religious praxis, which involves ‘theological orientations, tactics of publicity and marketing and organisational cultures that bear clear traces to the secular logics of market, economy and individualism’ (Qian and Kong, 2017a: 2). These ‘secular logics’ have permeated many churches in Singapore, which find justification in the impasse that they must negotiate. One pastor argued that ‘when you grow beyond a few hundred, it is imperative to secure a stable location and facilities’ (cited in The Straits Times, 2010), with the commercialisation of religious praxis being seen as a necessary enabler of a churches’ viability and ongoing growth. Over many years of navigating the impasse, religious groups have responded to the ‘larger cultural logics’ within which they must operate and have adapted their ‘routine practices and organizational forms’ (Edgell, 2012: 251) accordingly.

For example, in 1998, NCC established a business arm, Rock Productions, to help finance its ongoing expansion. Beyond financial support, Rock Productions also provides a secular organisational structure through which NCC can negotiate government restrictions on the use of secular space by religious groups. Rock Productions is a management company that generates income through a range of ancillary businesses, including a retail centre, a travel agency and tour operator, and venue provider. In 2007, the successful commercialisation of NCC enabled Rock Productions to partner with property developer, CapitaLand, to build an integrated civic, retail, and entertainment hub at Vista Exchange in the one-north area of Singapore. Rock Productions eventually invested S$500 million in the project, which led to the ownership and management of the complex’s eight-level, 38,000 m² civic and cultural zone, and 5000-seat theatre (The Straits Times, 2008). Opening in 2012, Rock Productions’ investment in Vista Xchange enabled NCC to secure a physical presence from which it could continue to grow organisationally, congregationally, and commercially.

Beyond enabling religious groups to compete with secular agencies for space, commercialisation has a more profound impact on the structure, organisation, and operation of churches as well. Around the world, the ability to successfully leverage the benefits of commercialisation has resulted in many churches and other religious groups exhibiting a ‘strong material presence via spectacular buildings, stylish interior designs, capacious spaces, visual aesthetics’ and a heavy reliance ‘on the technologies of pop culture, semiotics and performativity’ (Qian and Kong, 2017a: 6). Combined, such practices have brought about a reimagination of religion; one in which religious and secular logics are intertwined. For example, another eminent megachurch in Singapore – City Harvest Church (CHC) – draws on the principles of capitalist business management and organisation, combined with charismatic leadership, to render Christianity a consumable commodity that will maximise its appeal to spiritually-hungry Singaporeans. Yet, while NCC chose to partner with a property developer to build a non-religious venue that it could use for religious purposes, CHC instead chose to invest S$310 million to become a co-owner of Suntec City (and to secure access to its 12,000-seat auditorium) in 2010 (The Straits Times, 2010). While these two strategies – one of property development, the other of property acquisition – enable religious groups to establish a physical presence, such presence does not necessarily render the spaces they occupy sacred. Rather, they serve a functional purpose that reflects the broader regulatory framework within which they operate.

The desecularisation of space

The competition for space and the commercialisation of religious praxis have caused religious groups to approach the reproduction of space in a more functional way. The spatial reproductions of religious groups are more about the desecularisation of space than they are sacralisation. The government enforces such practices. In 2012, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) – the government agency responsible for the planning and regulation of land – clarified its guidelines regarding the extent to which secular spaces could be used for religious purposes. Clarification was the government’s response to the increasingly visible competition between religious and secular groups for secular spaces. The URA commented that ‘sustained and significant use of commercial venues for religious activities should not crowd out the commercial uses and significantly alter the secular nature of these places’ (URA, 2010). The URA’s guidelines were designed to enforce the ephemerality of spatial reproduction and to curb any attempts at sacralisation. The guidelines state how religious groups could use such spaces on a ‘non-exclusive and limited basis’ (i.e. occupying a maximum of 20,000 m² or 20% of the gross floor area, whichever is smaller, and to occupy the space for a maximum of 2 days/week), and that

there should be no display of signage, advertisements or posters of the religious use at the premises or on the exterior of the building. The premises should not be furnished to resemble a worship hall and there should be no display of religious symbols, icons or any religious paraphernalia at or within the venue when it is not in use by the religious organization. (URA, 2012)

Such guidelines ensure that the reproduction of space remains spatially and temporally confined, which ensures that it serves a mostly functional purpose. As Kong (1992: 21–22, emphasis added) notes, ‘places which d[o] not have an intrinsic sacredness will be imbued with the sacred through human ascription’, with even churches and mosques in Singapore being described as ‘buildings [that] are not sacred but functional’. This emphasis on functionality – in providing spaces that enable the practice of religion, but which do not necessarily become imbued with religion themselves – can, in some ways, dilute the experience of religion. The fact that the spaces used by religious groups are often imbued with predominantly secular meaning – even NCC’s theatre in Vista Xchange is a secular space for six days of the week – necessitates such functionalism. This more functional reproduction of space in Singapore reflects the fact that religious groups and their adherents ‘are not totally free to invest their meanings and values as they wish because there are others with the power to shape the contexts and constraints’ (Kong, 1993: 24). Whereas existing work on the sacralisation of space ‘confidently foreground[s] the understanding that place produces meaning, and that meaning can be grounded in space’ (David, 2012), urban environments often restrict the ability of religious groups to ‘invest’ space with their own ‘meanings and values’. This, in turn, leads to politics of religious urbanism (David, 2012: 451).

The politics of religious urbanism

Despite the necessity of the practices that constitute religious urbanism in Singapore, such practices also lead to a politics of praxis. While traffic, parking, and noise problems have been cited as some of the more prosaic issues related to the use of secular spaces for religious purposes, the politics of impermanence have more wide-ranging ramifications that stem from the functional reproduction of space. The fact that ‘there is no corporate, shared sense of meaning’ (Gilliat-Ray, 2005: 367) attached to the secular spaces used by religious groups can undermine the integrity of religious experience. The desecularisation of space encourages a non-material conceptualisation of the church; one in which religion is found in secular – and non-sacred – spaces that accord with the profanation logics of the state. This is a conceptualisation that some adherents may struggle with. As Kong (1992: 30) notes, ‘there are both written and unwritten codes of behaviours which people observe when they are in churches, temples and mosques’ that serve to limit ‘desecrating’ behaviours while encouraging those that contribute to the sanctity of the place. Such behaviours are often not associated with desecular spaces, which in turn can emplace limitations on the experience of religion. Beyond lacking a sense of meaning, the politics of impermanence can also extend to the fact that churches are often forced to regularly move locations. Writing about a house church in Singapore, Kong (2002) observes,

tensions arise when adherents, who seek the rootedness and identity of place and who encounter [the house church] as a repository of personalised memory and a centre of everyday routine, are confronted with the need to resolve and cope with the imminence of relocation. (Kong, 2002: 1583)

Politics of impermanence thus stem from the view that churches are (to varying degrees) misaligned with the functional purpose of secular spaces, and vice versa. This extends not just to the praxis and experience of religion, but to its commercialisation as well. The power of religious groups afforded by their commercialisation has sparked public debate around the encroachment of religion into the secular domain, the blurring of the boundary between the religious and the secular, and the intermixing of categories. It has also coincided with the emergence of a new strand of Christianity since the 1980s, which is defined by prosperity theology and resonates strongly with the upwardly mobile middle classes. As much as religious urbanism is a response to the challenges of religious praxis in urban environments, so too does it reflect broader shifts in the consumption of religion in Singapore; and just as these shifts have given rise to new religious formations, so too have they given rise to new compromises in the search for space.

Conclusion

This article has advanced a new understanding of the recursive relationship between religious groups and the urban environment, enshrined in the notion of ‘religious urbanism’. This understanding is based on the fact that as much as the urban environment is shaped by the presence and praxis of religious groups, so too are the organisation and operations of religious groups shaped by urban environments. The Singapore case validates these ideas, as it reveals how the ‘functions, meaning and form’ of religious praxis changes as ‘social, economic and political circumstances shift’ (Tong and Kong, 2000: 30). Building on the idea that ‘religious representations are embroiled in dynamic equilibriums between parallel horizons and competing forces’ (Qian and Kong, 2017a: 5), Christian groups in Singapore become more competitive through commercialisation, which in turn necessitates a different relationship with the spaces they occupy. Rather than sacralising space outright, they engage in practices of spatial reproduction that are more about desecularising space than imbuing a sense of sacredness. While religious praxis enables ‘collective, emotional engagement with space’ (Finlayson, 2017: 303), such engagements become more nuanced and problematic when experienced in the context of desecularised – as opposed to sacralised – space.

Beyond its theoretical contributions, this article has highlighted an emerging gulf between the planning and praxis of religion in urban environments around the world. The pressures of urban environments cause religious groups to respond in increasingly flexible and transgressive ways. As much as this enables new forms religious praxis to emerge, so too does it undermine the efforts of urban planners to implement solutions that address the problem of space constraints. In Singapore, plans to share space among churches, or to build multi-storey complexes holding multiple religious groups, have been mooted and debated, yet denominational differences make such plans untenable. While finding ways to close the gap between the planning and praxis of religion, more work also needs to be done to understand the effects of religious urbanism – ranging from the effects of spatial impermanence and the functional reproduction of space, to the commercial logic of religious praxis – on the experience, perception, and meaning of religion.