From religious to secular place-making: How does the secular matter for religious place construction in the local?

Abstract

The literature on religious place-making has largely prioritized an emic perspective of religious actors often reducing the secular aspect of such place-making to a mere ‘emptying out’ of religion from public space. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with political and religious representatives in Montreuil, one of the flagship towns of the ‘red belt’ of municipalities around Paris, this article looks at secular aspects of religious place construction. The discussion focusses on two practices of secular place-making: defining of religion ‘worthy’ of place and shifting the boundary between public and private space. Comparing the municipality’s interactions with Muslim groups on the one hand, and evangelical churches on the other, I show that politics and sensibilities of the secular towards the religious vary for different religious groups over time. Locality can thus be understood as dynamic mode of secularism, enabling a constant placing and re-placing of religion.

Introduction

In summer 2016, photographs of French policemen asking a woman to either remove her ‘burkini’ – a bathing costume covering most of her body except her face – or leave a public beach in Nice sparked controversy in the media worldwide. Opinions about this incident diverged: some saw it as a provocative invasion of new forms of religious expression into the public space. For others, it was yet another example of notoriously religion-averse laïcité, the French variant of secularism, enacting discriminatory policies against Muslims. ¹ Over the last three decades contentious debates taking issue with specific religious practices have become common in France and Europe more generally; they scrutinize the place of religion, and especially Islam, in Western democracies (Göle, 2014).

Somewhat paradoxically given this ongoing contestation, Islam – as well as other so-called religious ‘newcomers’ – has for many years ‘taken’ place in French cities. As a visitor to these spaces one can clearly perceive signs of religious presence: places of worship, posters advertising religious events, people wearing religious dress, religious processions, and calls for prayer. Certainly, this presence creates local conflict at times, as the many debates about the construction of places of worship show; yet at the same time there is no doubt that religious diversity and its manifestations are a lived reality in the local, as an extensive literature on religion in urban spaces shows (Frégosi and Willaime, 2001; Becci et al., 2013). How then are we to make sense of such conflicting reports on religious presence in France? What place can religion take in the French public space? And on what conditions does such religious place-taking hinge?

This article aims to contribute to the research on religious place-making in the urban. Whilst I develop my reflections with specific reference to France, they apply to a wider European context. Much of the literature on religious place-making has focused on the emic perspective of religious groups. Consequently, I argue, it fails to sufficiently consider the constitutive other of the religious – that is, the secular. This omission reduces the role of the secular to that of a shallow antagonist who aims at solely ‘emptying out’ religious presence. Whilst yielding rich examples of the creativity of religious groups in finding different ways to negotiate their presence in the city, the literature on religious place-making hence falls short of identifying systematic features of the secular operating in space. Based on ethnographic work in Montreuil, a small city to the east of Paris, I investigate how local authorities shape the religious place-making of two religious traditions whose presence in the city has become repeatedly disputed: Islam and evangelical churches. Such a comparative approach allows me to delve deeper into the secular aspect of religious place-making, conceiving of the secular in its own right rather than as a mere response to the religious.

In the first section, I problematize the literature’s focus on the emic perspective of religious actors. To complement their perspective, and drawing on arguments of Critical Secular Studies (Agrama, 2012; Asad, 2003; Mahmood, 2015), I will introduce a concept of secular place-making. In the second section, I will flesh out this concept by relating it to concrete regulation dynamics of religious presence in Montreuil.

‘The secular’ in literature on religious place-making

Interest in religion and urban space has grown immensely since the late 1980s. Within the so-called ‘spatial turn’, scholars from different disciplines such as Religious Studies, the Social Sciences, and Geography have set out to study the importance of space for religion (Kong, 1990). Often, such interest has been connected to issues of migration, diversity, and recognition, and has inspired rich ethnographic work on religious identities and their struggles in negotiating their presence in cities around the world (Becci et al., 2013; Gomez and van Herck, 2012; Knott 2008; Pinxton and Dikomitis, 2009). The geographer Lily Kong (2001) introduces a useful distinction in order to navigate the burgeoning field; on the one side she sees studies interested in the poetics of space, which inscribe themselves in a tradition of research going back to Mircea Eliade (1973). Often drawing on phenomenology, current approaches in this line suggest that religious spaces feel a certain way and propose different ways to study such feeling, for instance through concepts of practice or embodiment (Holloway, 2013; Mazumdar and Mazumdar, 2004; Olson et al., 2013). On the other side, Kong groups studies interested in the politics of space that are more focused on the contestations around religious place-making. Studies in this vein have delved into the conflicting spatial imaginations as put forward by religious groups, state authorities, or urban planners, inquiring when these conceptions interact or conflict (Berns, 2016).

Both lines of research – poetics but also politics – have concentrated on the perspectives of religious groups carving (their) religious presence into secular space, through discursive and bodily practices that enact religious place. A thorough conceptual inquiry into the secular aspect of such place-making has hence been limited: studies mostly assume that the secular aspect consists of preventing religious symbolization in certain spaces. Or, alternatively, they have characterized secular spatial imaginaries, not necessarily opposed to religious presence, but containing it in certain ways (Hervieu-Léger, 2002). Questions like ‘How is secular place-making performed?’, ‘Does secular place-making have characteristic dynamics to it?’, and ‘What is specifically secular about state strategies of marginalization and informalization of religion?’ have thus remained largely unanswered by the literature on the poetics and politics of religious place-making.

Taking up this gap in the literature, recent contributions have emphasized that religious place-making cannot be studied in an isolated manner. For example, research on the visibility and audibility of religious presences (especially in relation to Muslim ‘newcomers’ in Western Europe) has argued that conflicts have to be analyzed in connection to the context-specific history of religious presence and toleration (Beekers and Arab Tamini, 2016; Oosterbaan, 2014), not least the iconic dominance of Christianity (Knott et al., 2016). These studies have opened up exciting new avenues for the study of religion in urban space. Yet, a systematic reflection on the specific secular aspect of place-making is only starting to emerge (Howe, 2017). It is to this line of research that the following reflections aim to contribute.

Why the secular is not just empty – an approach to secular place-making

The question of implications of a supposedly intensified vitality of religion in cities for our understanding of the secular and secularization has sparked much controversy. Some scholars take it as evidence to refute the secularization thesis (Proctor, 2006) – the idea of a continuous decline of religion in modern societies – whilst for others it marks the beginning of a post-secular age as a new era, one in which the secular has lost its temporary hegemony over the interpretation of space (Baker and Beaumont, 2011).Whilst these approaches, similar to the literature on religious place-making, understand the secular in mere opposition to the religious, my approach aligns with a research tradition of Critical Secular Studies that challenges the idea of the secular as defined as ‘neutral of religious influences’. Instead, scholars in this line of research suggest that we can understand the secular as defined by its relation to the religious. They thus conceive of the secular as a processual formation, continuously reproducing itself, whilst also changing what is understood as religion and its legitimate expression (Asad, 2003). In this way, the emergence of the very category ‘religion’ has been traced back to Western Christendom, and its dominance has been explained through the circulation and imposition of the concept of ‘world religions’ through European colonialism (Masuzawa, 2005). Recent contributions in Critical Secular Studies have foregrounded the role of the state in defining religion and religious difference (Mahmood, 2015) – a focus that I will adopt in my own approach.

Whilst the various concepts and ideas put forward by Critical Secular Studies cannot be further discussed here, I suggest that their foundational idea of an intrinsic secular-religious relationship can enrich the conceptual approach to secular (and religious) place-making in two important ways: first, it urges us to focus in much more detail on processes through which the state defines religion. Second, it draws our attention to the evolution of a public/private boundary that historically has been integral to the containing endeavor of the secular (Agrama, 2012). Following postmodern geographers, I understand space as both socially constructed (Harvey, 1993; Lefebvre, 1992; Soja,1989) – a configuration that comprises physical, social, and mental place and hence defies a separation between material and ideal space (Massey, 1994). Accordingly, I conceive of secular place-making as the discursive and material practices through which the state constructs a place for religion. ² Particularly fruitful for explorations of secular place-making are contestations around religious presence, such as I attend to below, as they elicit practices of secular place-making and attempts to re-contain religion.

Field site and methods

This article draws from one year of ethnographic study in 2014–2015, and 36 in-depth interviews with municipal and religious actors in Montreuil, a small town of approximately 100,000 inhabitants in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis. The town is a flagship of the so-called red belt (ceinture rouge) of working-class towns around Paris – governed by the French Communist Party (PCF) since the 1920s – that came to exemplify a certain mode of organization of the ‘workers’ cities in France (Wacquant, 2008). Montreuil has always been at the crossroads of different migrant movements. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, migrants from Italy and Portugal, and later from Eastern Europe and Russia, settled in the newly founded town on the outskirts of Paris. In the 1950s and 1960s, mainly young men from the former colonies and protectorates, like Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Senegal, came to the city to work in the local industries (Schoon, 2007; Willard and Fort, 1982). After the economic crisis of the 1970s, and the passage of legislation tightening French immigration, many settled down permanently and obtained French citizenship. In 2008, 10% of the population was born in Sub-Saharan countries and 6% in the Maghreb region. ³ At the time of my research in 2014, over a quarter of the approximately 100,000 habitants did not hold French citizenship. ⁴

The city is an intriguing site to study secular place-making. Migratory movements, but also a pluralization of religious fields, have resulted in diverse religious affiliations of the Montreuillois. Mere quantitative presence is difficult to gauge, since the French state does not officially register religious affiliation of its citizens. A (unofficial) register of the municipal library listed five Catholic churches and two chapels, two synagogues, two mosques and at least seven Muslim prayer rooms in the town. In the annual register of the Conseil National des Evangéliques de France (CNEF), six Evangelical churches are registered in Montreuil, though I have come across six others in my research. There are also three Buddhist and one Hinduist organization in Montreuil. Apart from vitality of religious life, the frequent conflicts around religious presence and the active involvement of the municipality allow for a fruitful study of secular place-making in the city. Since the 1990s, Muslim groups and evangelical churches have made claims for spatial access. In 2003, Jean-Pierre Brard, mayor from 1984–2008, launched two construction projects, a mosque and a synagogue, and initiated a series of religious dialogue events at the town hall. In 2008, Dominique Voynet (Europe Ecologie Les Verts) succeeded Brard as a mayor, temporarily suspending the communist rule of the city (Delacroix, 2009). According to my interlocutors, Voynet did not focus on dialogue with religious groups and initiatives by Brard petered out. In 2014, Patrice Bessac from the leftist party Front Gauche was elected mayor. During the time of my field research, he had just started to reanimate contacts with religious groups.

Such proactive stance towards religious groups might appear counterintuitive to French laïcité, often portrayed as one of the strictest secular regimes of separation between church and state that largely prohibits the state to intervene in religious affairs, or only even acknowledge religion. Legally however, several aspects of religious practice directly concern the competence of the municipality, such as building security, maintenance of the cemeteries, catering for state school cafeterias and public demonstrations. Consequently, and as research has shown, contact and cooperation between municipal and religious representatives has always existed to certain degrees at the local level (Frégosi and Willaime, 2001).

To study secular place-making in Montreuil, I interviewed the former mayor Jean-Pierre Brard, former and current municipal counselors, civil servants charged with building security, representatives and members of religious groups (mainly Muslim and evangelical, but also Catholic, Jewish and two Buddhist) and social workers asking them about their religious practices and conflicts about religious presence in town. I complemented such research with participant observations in multiple sites where I expected the place of religion to be negotiated, such as interfaith dialogues and community meetings.

Defining religion ‘worthy’ of place

A first practice through which the municipality shaped religious place-making was via defining, attributing, or denying the very label ‘religious’ itself. In 2003, upon the initiative of the former mayor Brard, the municipal council of Montreuil conceded communal land to two construction projects, one mosque and one synagogue, making use of the legal instrument bail emphytéotique. ⁵ For the construction of the mosque, Brard imposed the foundation of a Muslim umbrella organization – la Fedération cultuelle des associations musulmanes de Montreuil (FCAMM) – that oversaw the construction process launched in 2004 and completed in 2009.

Whilst considered non-orthodox practice following strict interpretations of laïcité, research has shown that municipalities in France since the early 2000s increasingly facilitated and staged cooperation with religious actors (Lamine, 2005). In particular, there is a rich literature addressing the numerous joint mosque construction projects, through which local municipalities in France (and elsewhere) aimed to unify or select amongst often multiple Muslim groups in town in order ‘to construct’ one official Muslim interlocutor (Boubeker, 2006; de Galembert, 2007). In Montreuil, I observed similar processes when the former mayor Brard at the end of 2003 launched a series of interreligious dialogue events at the town hall, to which he invited representatives of the newly created FCAMM as representatives of ‘the Muslim community of Montreuil.’

Interesting from a perspective of secular place-making is how the category of ‘religion’ was referred to in justifying the construction of the mosque and selection of the FCAMM’s board. Three major issues emerged from the interviews. First, the construction of the mosque was often justified with the need to prevent an Islam des caves – a ‘hidden’ Islam potentially breeding radicalization (Kepel, 1987). ‘We cannot control everyone, it is impossible,’ affirmed the president of the FCAMM, ‘But if you have a mosque and if you have a representative, you know whom to talk to when there is trouble’. In such talk, Brard and the FCAMM reiterated a common motive that associates Islam with the danger of terrorism, which required action for the municipality (Cesari, 2005). Second, and in connection to the last point, municipal counselors and Muslim representatives talked about their concern to select ‘the right kind’ of Islam for cooperation. The decisive criterium in such choice was the groups’ or representatives’ compliance with laïcité as understood by the municipality. For instance, Brard characterized the current leader of the central mosque as someone who was well versed in the history and rules of laïcité and thus an appropriate religious representative. Third, the former mayor and his partners emphasized how urgent the construction of a mosque had been in the early 2000s, since Muslims at the time did not have an adequate place to pray in contrast to other religious groups in town. Under the subsequent mayors Voynet and Bessac, however, municipal counselors denounced such cooperation in the name of equality as, from their perspective, clearly violating the norm of non-intervention, a central principle of laïcité. Such diverging interpretations of laïcité notwithstanding, no one in the subsequent municipalities doubted that Islam was one of the three major religions and that the municipality should at least consider assisting in the installation of new places of worship.

Comparing such efforts towards Muslims with the experience of evangelical churches trying to open up places of worship in Montreuil provides further insights into how the category of ‘religious’ became operative in secular place-making. For many of these churches, in fact, their very recognition as ‘religious’ was at stake during interactions with the authorities in local contexts (Dejean, 2009; Mottier, 2008). Centrally constituent of this insecurity is the French state’s fight against sects, which has been a ubiquitous concern of public policy-making since the 1990s (Hervieu-Leger, 2001; Ollion, 2017). The difficulty of distinguishing between sects and ‘real’ religious groups also emerged as the central concern regarding the evangelical presence in Montreuil. Many of the churches, as the former mayor Brard explained, ‘were gathering places for migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean who suffered hardship and discrimination’. ⁶ Embracing doubtful dogmata, sectarian leaders would make use of this desperate situation to physically and financially abuse their members. Since the 2000s, regular articles in the communal newspaper Montreuil Dépêche warned against such sectarian dangers. ⁷ A second concern regarding the evangelical presence in town that emerged from my interviews with municipal counselors was their ‘non-localness’. The relatively low rent and well-developed public transportation to Paris, as the municipal consultant for religious affairs under the mayor Bessac explained, fostered the ‘predatory behavior’ of external groups. To prevent access to space by evangelical groups with doubtful credentials, the municipality took different paths. One pastor of a small evangelical church in the Bas Montreuil remembered vividly that even when his church had commissioned a professional architect to adjust their plans to local security standards, it was refused twice by the administrative services. As I learnt from my interviews at the administration services, the follow-up on building security rules can be more or less rigorously enforced. The mayor can also mandate control visits at any time. Several evangelical pastors mentioned one of such visits in particular, paid by Brard personally. On a Sunday in February 2005, he ‘made a tour’ in four evangelical churches in town, interrupting the service and asking for the documents confirming building security. The intervention created a media scandal far beyond the local context. Although Brard apologized in the aftermath, two churches left Montreuil after this incident. The example illustrates how building security becomes a central tool to police what kind of religious groups gain access to the urban space.

In short, secular place-making operates via the category of the ‘religious.’ Whilst certain religious groups are exempted from any scrutiny of their religiousness, such as Catholics and Jews as well as Muslims, for many evangelical churches the very attribution of the label is at issue. What is more, in relation to their potential implantation, the label ‘religious’ becomes associated with larger discourses and sensibilities characterizing distinct religious traditions, such as the perceived risks regarding their presence: a security threat and undermining of laïcité in the case of Islam, a certain alienness to town in the case of Evangelical churches.

Shifting the boundary between public and private

Apart from defining the category of the ‘religious,’ a second way in which the municipality shaped religious presence was through determining the boundary separating public and private space and locating religion along this line. Under laïcité, the removal of religion from the strictly public space, understood as the realm of all public institutions, has been particularly rigorous. Confining religious practices to the private, so it appears in the official accounts, laïcité secures the impartiality of the state on the one hand, allowing for the liberty of religion of each citizen on the other. ⁸

Conflicts emerge in relation to where practices of religious symbolism can take place. In Montreuil, the foundation of the Muslim activist group Mamans Toutes Égales (MTE) has created much controversy in this regard. In 2012, the minister of education at the time, Luc Chatel, issued a regulation, in which he suggested considering parents accompanying school excursions as collaborators of public service, who by law are forbidden to wear any ‘ostentatious religious signs.’ Referring to the so-called Circulaire Chatel, in November 2012, the primary school Paul Lafargue in Montreuil decided to make ‘neutrality of appearance’ obligatory for accompanying parents. To protest the school’s decision, MTE was founded as a collective of concerned parents and their supporters. The reference to religious freedom occupies a central role in the discourse of MTE, as Esra, one of their members affirmed: ‘No one has the right to tell me what I ought to believe. I could have chosen to be Christian or atheist. I have chosen to be Muslim. Yet, I am also a mother. I cannot separate my identity.’ As expressed in this citation, Esra conceived wearing a headscarf as integral to her person, as practice she could not renounce when accompanying her son during in the purportedly public space of school excursions (Kastoryano and Escafré-Dublet, 2012).

Such emphasis on the individual right to religious expression – blatantly neglecting the distinction between public and private space – encountered fierce resistance at the local level. In his function as regional delegate, Brard vehemently fought against all mobilization of the group, actively trying to prevent their meetings. Their actions were also condemned by Muslim representatives. ‘One should not show one’s religion publicly like that,’ similarly explained one board member of the FCCAM to me. ‘At home, you can educate your child religiously and culturally. In the public space, everyone should be comfortable.’ However, the attitude of the municipality towards the group changed after Brard was no longer in office: MTE was officially received at the town hall by Brard’s successors Voynet and Bessac. What is more, the current municipal consultant responsible for the state schools in Montreuil even told me that he was in favor of the group’s efforts and had arranged a meeting with concerned school boards in order to ask them to rethink their internal regulatory concerning school excursions. Thus, what becomes apparent from the case of MTE is that the implementation of the public/private boundary can be more or less strict and that stances of the municipality on these issues can shift over time.

In other cases, the boundary between public and private was enforced more fiercely. In interviews with members of evangelical churches, the issue of their missionary activities came up frequently. A pastor from an evangelical church explained the underlying problem as follows:

Religion has to be restricted to the private. But that’s not working, because people who have a spiritual life want to share their experiences with others, they want to tell others about it. Also, they have to help other people in the name of God. But if we do that, they call it proselytism. And laïcité forbids proselytism. [author’s translation]

The municipality countered such expansive conceptions of religious practice (Bleuzen, 2010) – not to be contained within the walls of the church – with reference to the public/private boundary. The municipal counselor for religious affairs under Bessac recounted several instances when the evangelical churches had acted aggressively in public ‘trying to lure people into conversations,’ so that the municipality had to intervene. The American pastor of an evangelical church in Montreuil remembered such an incident at the local Christmas market, where he regularly put up an information stand. One time, he remembered, members of the municipal Council came by and started an argument. They told him that proselytizing was prohibited at a public Christmas market and insisted that he left. At the heart of a policing of religious presence was again the distinction between private and public that the municipality applies differently to religious groups; in this instance the town’s Christmas market was declared to be part of a public space, to be free of religious symbolism.

Recent research into the idea of ‘public space’ in Urban Studies has complexified the idea of a clear-cut separation and has introduced different types of spaces along a continuum of private and public according to criteria of ownership and responsibility (Chiodelli and Moroni, 2014). From a perspective of secular place-making, whilst helpful in challenging the idea of a clear-cut boundary, what such refined typologies of public space can help us emphasize is how the public-private boundary is fluid and evolving. The president of the local mosque talked about his frustrations trying to pin down such boundary. Muslim presence, he affirmed, did not end with a visit of the mosque but also comprised cultural and educational activities, such as Koran schools. When he tried to receive support for the establishment of a cultural center by the municipality, however, they always told him that they could not support such an initiative, since the public space had to remain neutral. Yet no one, he complained, could explain why the municipality that had initiated the construction of a mosque could not engage in the establishment of a cultural center. As he identified, the very classification of a space as public or private served as the municipality’s tool in secular place-making, which they selectively applied to regulate religious presences in some instances, but not in others.

Limits and dynamics of secular place-making in the local

Finally, the discursive and material practices of secular place-making discussed so far are also limited in important ways. Such limitations emerge from multiple aspects of boundedness of place (Lefebvre, 1992), as apparent in my ethnographic data. For example, secular place-making in Montreuil was limited in time, most evidently perhaps in the temporality of municipal governance. After 24 years in power, Brard lost his office to Voynet of the Green Party in 2008. As has been indicated in the examples above, the municipality under Voynet chose a different stance on state-religious relations. For instance, it no longer invited religious representatives for interreligious dialogues at the town hall and also stopped to engage in organization of the mosque building project, which truly angered the representatives of the FCAMM. The current mayor Bessac had only been in office for a few months when I conducted my field research. At that point, he had visited different places of worship in town and at different occasions had announced his aim to revitalize relations with religious groups. These changes might be explained with rather banal factors, for instance different policy priorities or, certainly the case for Voynet, the attempt to dissolve powerful patrimonial structures (Delacroix, 2009). However, I would argue that notwithstanding their specific content, the shifting approaches point to a more structural feature of secular place-making, namely its boundedness in time.

Further, the local space is embedded in other spatial scales (Lefebvre, 1992) that can also influence practices of secular place-making. An important example of such an influence emanates from the national legislation on laïcité. During my fieldwork, this became manifest in the state’s attempt to strengthen laïcité in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The Association des Maires de France (AMF), the representation of the municipalities at the national level, issued policy recommendations for a ‘strict endorsement’ of the fundamental pillars of laïcité specifically addressing local municipalities. Given ‘the illegitimate intrusion of religion into the public space’, the report argued, the municipalities were at the forefront of defending the crucial principle of non-intervention. 20 pages of the report elaborate on clarifications of French law on public-religious relations on local level: for instance, practices like the allocation of land for the construction of worship places or financial support for cultural associations with a religious character are declared illegal. ⁹ While there was no ambition to directly control the implementation of these guidelines, the report was perceived and referred to by my interlocutors on the local level. Examples of influences from other levels of space could be multiplied. For instance, groups like MTE challenge local secular place-making through connecting to advocacy structures on the regional and national level, such as the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie (CCIF), which reinforces their resources in the local, for instance legal competence.

As these examples show, a locality’s boundedness in time and space gives rise to a procedural character of secular place-making (Agrama, 2012). Although the municipality produces and polices certain places for religion, these are constantly rendered unstable, thus engendering re-negotiation. Despite this, certain modes of placing religion remain remarkably stable, as the continuous attempt to contain religious presence within places of worship, which historically can be derived from dominant understandings of the appropriate place of religion evolved in relation to Western Christendom (Göle, 2010). One could further disentangle those different forces shaping and braking continuities in secular place-making. Important for the discussion here, however, is the emphasis on constant destabilization as characteristic feature of secular place-making practices.

Conclusion

Secular place-making in Montreuil operates via definitions of the religious and the invocation of a public/private boundary that are applied differently to different religious traditions, as the comparison of Muslims or evangelical groups has shown. For research and literature on religious place-making, these findings are an urgent appeal to not take categories of ‘religious’ or the ‘public/private’ for granted when analyzing secular spatial imaginations. Rather, scholars should be attentive to constant evolution and selective implementation of these categories which needs to be explained in relation to the specific context – be it Montreuil, the beach in Nice or the global media. As Nicolas Howe puts it:

In a secular age, ‘sacred space’ comes in quotation marks. It is always contingent, at least in the public sphere. This contingency is not culturally uniform. It is shaped by the same historical forces that shape secularization itself, which vary greatly from society to society, place to place. (Howe, 2017: 19)

Vice versa, a focus on space as proposed by the literature on religious place-making can also enrich understandings of modes of religious containment, which are put forward by Critical Secular Studies. The analysis of secular place-making practices in Montreuil has shown how the purported secular paradox, an oscillation between universal principles and their necessarily particular interpretation (Fernando, 2014), can be traced empirically in space. Going beyond both the idea of specific ‘varieties of secular place-making’, locality is hence not only a place in which different influences are articulated. It is also a dynamic mode of secularism – enabling constant re-defining and re-placing of religion.