Worldview complexity: The challenge of intersecting diversities for conceptualising diversity

Abstract

Social science analysis of diversity, and religious diversity in particular, has long struggled to move beyond simple binaries of religious-secular, religious-spiritual, traditional-modern, global north-global south, and so on. Twenty-first century realities test existing terms and find them wanting. While concepts such as the postsecular, multiple modernities, multiple secularities, and non-religion point to new lines of analysis, each still refers to binary and thereby limiting terms. This article reviews research on religious diversity, delineating some of the major challenges posed. Building on useful frameworks of superdiversity, multiple pluralities, and religious complexity, we argue that the more widely encompassing concept of worldview complexity might represent a better way forward. It has the advantage of acknowledging the intersecting diversity of diversities in multiple, differing contexts, and abiding similarities in what is occurring ‘beneath religion’.

New thinking about diversity is emerging in the social sciences, a substantive amount of it centred upon, but by no means limited to, religious diversity. New ideas, theories, and thinking are necessitated by the rising tide of research describing religious diversity today in societies around the world. Whatever else, research reveals patterns of diversity are continually changing and demanding new ways to describe what is found and new explanations of relationships observed. A considerable amount of this conceptualisation, however, is insufficient, being driven not so much by theory and analysis, but rather by explorations in creative description.

This article begins by reviewing some of the literature associated with this new wave of thinking to identify issues arising from critical research and policy developments. Much of this work towards new conceptualisations reflects creative efforts to deal with diversity in non-binary ways that nevertheless struggle to shake-off old modes of thought, and particularly binary terminology. The construction of religion as other worldly and sacred, in opposition to the worldly and the profane, is a false binary that is increasingly being seen as a form of conceptual violence, imposed by the so-called modern, colonial North on the global South (Hedges, 2020). Moreover, such binaries are based on an us versus them dichotomy, which exacerbates conceptual and resulting structural violence. The binary of religion and spirituality is also problematic, and has been queried by experts in recent years. This article merely delineates and maps out this struggle to overcome dichotomous thinking in order to sensitise scholars to the prevalence of binaries and tentatively to identify potential points of departure.

While this article begins with a review of critical contemporary literature, it is also driven by realisations directly resulting from recent empirical research. In particular, it arises from trying to conceptualise the diversities observed in a study of Australian teens’ responses to religious and sexual diversity, of which two of this article’s authors, Gary Bouma and Anna Halafoff, were Chief Investigators (Singleton et al., 2019, 2021). In analysing the qualitative and quantitative data collected in this study, it became clear that the responses of many Australian teenagers did not fit naturally into traditional binaries such as religious–secular, religious–spiritual, male–female, gay–straight; let alone traditional religious categories (Rasmussen et al., 2020; Singleton et al., 2021). Being careful not to deductively impose preconceptions grounded in past research, we discovered by way of a latent class analysis what might best be described as clusters – not a spectrum, nor a continuum – of types of worldviews that reflected and expressed the diversity of these teens’ views about and engagement with meaning, morals, and transcendence. We retained this clustered diversity in analysing our findings as six worldview types (Singleton et al., 2018, 2019, 2021). But that was only one dimension of the non-binary diversities observed. In the absence of a better alternative, we use the term ‘worldview’ to point towards a realm of human social life that includes religious, spiritual, rationalist, and philosophical approaches. We do not intend it as a hierarchical, structured, or encompassing way of looking at the world, but rather use it as a non-binary indicator, arguing the need for new thinking and non-binary terms, driven by insights from our own empirical work and a review of scholarship.

Bouma and Halafoff were also involved in a large-scale Religion and Diversity Project lead by Canadian sociologist of religion Beaman which compared religious diversity in five different, but strategically similar, societies – Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. In this study too, many kinds of religious diversity were discovered; diversities of religious organisation, religious identity profiles, religious history, religious policies, religious education, religion, and sexuality, to say nothing of diversities of context, language, custom, and forms of governance. That this welter of diversities was not reduced to some neat overarching integrative theoretical formulation is testimony not to failure, but rather to being faithful to the ‘messy reality’ of the diverse realities encountered (Beyer and Beaman, 2019). Wilkins-Laflamme (2017) reports a similar messy reality in a study of religious, spiritual, secular ‘landscapes’ of the Pacific Northwest and Quebec. She made no attempt, however, to go beyond binary or traditional denominational categories of analysis.

Further stimulation to seek new ways to conceptualise diversity has been provided by working on the Religious Diversity in Australia project, of which all three of this article’s authors are Chief Investigators. Following efforts of the larger project team, led by Douglas Ezzy, to interrogate the term social cohesion (Ezzy et al., 2020), studies of religious diversity at the neighbourhood level in Melbourne (in the project’s Demographic Stream), and of the nexus between religion and migration (in the Migration Stream), are revealing that this cosmopolitan city, long known for its cultural, religious, and spiritual diversity, amplified considerably by successive waves of post-war migration beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, is in the twenty-first century enjoying substantial increases in its diversity due to large waves of recent migration from ‘new’ sources and the impact of internal mobility (Bouma et al., 2018, 2021).

The encounters with religious diversity in surveys, interviews, and focus groups conducted for these projects left us desiring to contribute to ongoing discourses while being increasingly unsatisfied by the available conceptual frameworks. While much of the research has dealt with differences in the distribution of religious identities, there are many other varying facets of religion that further complexify the landscape – types of organisation, theological systems, ethical approaches, geographical distribution, and a host more (Beckford, 2003; Beyer and Beaman, 2019). New, non-binary concepts of difference are called for but continue to be lacking. It should be noted, however, that they are beginning to emerge in studies of sexuality and gender, and point to possible ways forward (Rasmussen et al., 2020). These research projects ground our approach to conceptualising religious diversity in the social sciences in the realities of current life and drive our concern to move beyond existing binaries to modes and forms of thinking that retain the reality of diversity in ways that help us to understand our experiences and to assist in the development of suitable social theory, social policy, and future research.

Problematic binaries

Following are some key examples of the range of conceptualisations that have emerged regarding religion in the twenty-first century. Religious diversity has increasingly become a critically important topic, although more among politics scholars than sociologists, since the perceived return of religion to the public space (Appleby, 2000; Casanova, 1994; Thomas, 2005). The perception of this ‘return’ was substantially facilitated by the ‘conversions’ of sociologist Berger (1999) and theorists Habermas (2006, 2015), Taylor (2007), and Derrida (1998) from sacred/secular binaries to thinking beyond the teleological necessities of secularisation and modernisation theories.

Among some scholars of political science, once the diversity discourse is liberated from focussing on immediate issues such as terrorism and violent extremism and how to counter them, and from associated extreme/radical versus normal, or acceptable–not acceptable binaries, it often proceeds to be dealt with under the banner of postsecularity. The term ‘postsecular’ has often been used to point to the emerging forms of religion–state, religion–policy relations that are occurring in the twenty-first century. Cloke and Beaumont (2012) speak of ‘the emergence of urban spaces of partnership between people of faith and those of no religious faith’ as instances of postsecularity (p. 27). They are quick to insist that this is most decidedly not a return to old forms, but rather something new, something that reaches beyond previously used conceptual binaries. Beckford (2012) provides a careful critical analysis of the many meanings of, and approaches to, thinking about postsecularity concluding that the level of diversity today is so great that a single core narrative cannot be described and that much of the postsecular discourse tends towards being normative and speculative, and not grounded in empirical studies. This is further complicated by the multiple meanings of the term secular as applied in different contexts (Taylor, 2007). The conceptual inadequacies of the notion of the postsecular, including manifold conflicting meanings and the implicit retention of at least two foundational binaries, pre versus post and religious versus secular, are broadly acknowledged and used as a springboard to open a discussion of conceptualising and researching diversity. This is a welcome line of discussion but one which has yet to produce a satisfactory framework of conceptualisation.

Similarly, Eisenstadt (2017), the godfather of ‘modernity’ studies, speaks of ‘multiple modernities’ moving beyond the original concept of a necessary linear process from underdevelopment through development to modernity. Linear progress towards modernity had hitherto been seen as representing the only conceivable path out of poverty to national wealth. By the twenty-first century, however, the diversity of experiences and different trajectories required at least ‘multiple’ modernities, if not the scrapping of the concept altogether. Michel et al. (2017) present a thorough overview of intersecting diversities and transformative social processes of globalisation and transnational communication under the label of multiple modernities. A related concept that is also no longer in vogue, is ‘postmodernity’. Each of these ‘modernity’ concepts beg definitions of modernity, and data to support some kind of unidirectional shift, lest they run rough shod over empirical realities. The very diversity of phenomena, processes, and outcomes pointed to also undermines their utility as concepts.

Sociologists of culture speak of multiple secularities and secular modernities (Shuh et al., 2012; Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, 2012) in a critical refocussing of secularisation theory and related processes aimed at liberating thought from the teleological necessities of earlier theories of modernisation and secularisation in the light of conflicting evidence from Europe and, most importantly, other societies where secularisation theory simply does not fit, China being a notable example (Woo, 2019). Moreover, Burchardt (2017) contends that ‘important connections between neoliberal capitalism and religion emerge through an examination of the ways regimes of religious diversity governance have become a central form of power’. For example, the intersection of neoliberal capitalism and religion is reaching new and politically potent expression in Pentecostal religious movements such as Hillsong (Blaine, 2020). As new intersections of institutions, organisations, ideas, and ways of thinking become apparent, our understandings of both religion and secularity are being reconceptualised as researchers report how each is taking different forms as they continue to contest for influence on social policy and practice.

Nevertheless, most sociological discussions of religious diversity and the ‘return’ of religion continue to be stuck in a secularisation paradigm that reduces to the level of analysis to merely seeing a moving boundary between two identifiable, distinguishable ‘others’ – religion and the secular, where secular is understood to be non-religion. Recent debates over lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning/queer (LGBTIQ) issues; same-sex marriage; abortion; and other skirmishes in the culture wars are characterised by squabbling over either the conceptual or political boundaries between the secular and the religious. Fixation on the secularisation, or modernisation models, results in the denial of difference, as diversity is reduced to religion versus that something other, which is occasionally referred to as non-religion, or the secular. This clearly constitutes another failed and unhelpful binary.

Intersecting diversities

Until relatively recently, religious diversity seemed to clump with other diversities such as class, ethnicity, and political orientation. If you knew someone’s religious identity you could predict, with a fair degree of confidence, many other aspects of that person’s life. This is clearly no longer the case. Not only has diversity itself moved from simply denoting differences across one single domain to recognising diversity across multiple domains – ‘diversities’ – but these diversities intersect with other diversities producing much richer and more complex forms of diversity than that previously acknowledged.

For example, generational diversity can be seen as intersecting with multiple other domains of diversity in ways that compound overall diversity. Demographic research into religious diversity reveals generational differences that have become very pronounced and influential in policy making (Pew Research Center, 2015). Generational, or at least cohort, divides shape attitudes and perspectives. The Australian census reveals at least three major generational divides/groups – those born and raised before 1960 (Baby Boomers and their predecessors), those born and raised between 1960 and 1990 (Generations X and Y), and those born after 1990 (Generation Z). From a religious perspective, these generations reflect three very different worlds (Bouma and Halafoff, 2017; Halafoff et al., 2019) in which different diversities intersect.

For those born in Australia before 1960, during the time of the Immigration Restriction Act known as the White Australia Policy, and who are now over 60 years old, the religious world was dominated by Anglican and British Protestants who constituted two-thirds of the population. When they were young, discussion of religious diversity was primarily about the sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics, ecumenism was just beginning to soften boundaries, and conflict was normal. Identifying as being religious, albeit however nominal, was normal. These largely unquestioned certainties of their youth continue to colour much of the Boomers’ expectations of the world today – rigid boundaries, tense intergroup relations, White Protestant domination, and British superiority. For this generation, identities tended to line up and clump. In aggregate, this meant, Catholic, inclined towards the progressive Labour party and education in Catholic schooling, versus Protestant, inclined towards the conservative Liberal party and education in state or private schools linked to Protestant denominations. There were significant exceptions, such as those of the counter-culture movement who rebelled and looked to so-called Eastern spirituality for answers, and new migrants that initiated policies of tolerance for their diversity, but these exceptions tended to prove the rule.

For those born between 1960 and 1990, now aged between 30 and 59, the religious world in Australia was increasingly religious and spiritually diverse due to the ending of the White Australia policy, the institutionalisation of policies of multiculturalism, and the global movement of people and ideas. Australia also became increasingly dominated by Catholics whose numbers swelled with the arrival of non-British migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and beyond. Critical issues for members of this generation growing up included the American-led War in Vietnam and spill-over conflicts across Indo-China, the availability of birth control, and the inclusion of women in non-traditional work roles outside the home and in leadership across all domains. For the first time in history, many ordinary people became better educated than the average members of the clergy. There was increasing tension between churches and wider society as identity clumping for this group largely broke down. Today, there is a rising number of Generation X and Ys who describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR) or as converts to diverse religious traditions.

The religious world of those under 30 is different again, and even more so for those under 20. Over half of teens responding to the Worldviews of Australia’s Generation Z (AGZ) survey, for example, declared that they had ‘no religion’ but at the same time, 37% said that they believe in God and another 30% said that they believe in a ‘higher being’ with only one quarter (24%) responding by saying that they believed in ‘no God or higher being’. As a group, they clearly indicated that they are not against religion per se, and that they are open to some forms of the transcendent. Around one-quarter (24%) reported that they meditate regularly outside of school (Singleton et al., 2018, 2019, 2021).

They can be described as being awash but not adrift in a sea of diversity – ethnic, religious, spiritual, economic, sexuality, gender diversities, and more, but they are confident in feeling that they know who they are and understand what is healthy or harmful and what is not. Moving beyond binaries, the AGZ study identified six worldview types: this worldly/non-religious (23%), indifferent (15%), SBNR (18%), religious and spiritual (8%), nominally religious (20%), and religiously committed (17%) (Singleton et al., 2018, 2019). Simple binaries clearly no longer apply to this generation.

This generational analysis is presented to highlight and clarify some of the complexities produced by intersections of diversity experienced and encountered in research when researchers are open to seeing diversity across and between categories, groups, and measures. Many analyses tend to ignore the generational and developmental factors in diversity, seeing merely blocks of differentiated identities, organisations, or groups. Another diversifying element often overlooked is gender (Woodhead, 2008), which again, is too often treated as a simple binary, but is not (although, when only binary measures are employed, it can be forced to conform through conceptual violence). Religious diversities in Australia are made more diverse through an intersection with ethnic diversities and by diversities in time of arrival in Australia. But these are only some of the more obvious complexifying intersections compounding diversity in already diverse realities. They can be ignored, or papered over, but only at the cost of not clearly seeing and rigorously analysing what is in fact going on.

Exploding concepts

Much of the recent literature cited above helpfully begins by deconstructing such concepts as ‘religion’, ‘secular’, or ‘sacred’ by describing the ways the realities pointed to are internally diverse – the lived dimensions and reality of both the religious and the secular are not unitary and internally consistent realities (McGuire, 2008; for example, cf. Woodhead, 2013). Recent research into religious diversity reveals that internal diversity among religious groups typically exceeds the differences between groups (Beyer and Beaman, 2019; Bouma et al., 2021; Singleton et al., 2018, 2019). It is tempting to describe a global clash emerging between cosmopolitans, who accept and celebrate this diversity, and anti-cosmopolitans who resist it (Halafoff et al., 2019). Binaries, however, fail to depict the complexity of the picture, and it is better described as a cosmopolitan spectrum than a binary. These clashes often lead to religious leaders rebuilding walls of difference both within and between groups to shore up their power positions (Porter, 2013; Woodhead, 2016a). For example, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney – the most narrowly evangelical and reactionary Anglican diocese in Australia – has demanded that those who differed with him on same-sex marriage – and many do (Perales et al., 2019) – should ‘leave my church’ (Davies, 2019). By contrast, some young Australians and Canadians express critical and caring attitudes to intersecting diversities, notably sexuality diversity, and if their faith communities do not show respect for sexuality equality, they are likely to disengage with them (Halafoff et al., 2020). Sharply drawn internal differences like this reveal the limits of binary thinking and serve to remind us that religious communities are never monolithic, rendering the old ‘us vs them’ perspectives obsolete and misleading.

Binaries are inherently regressive social constructions that can only react to the reality of diversity, but have no capacity to transcend it let alone faithfully describe what is encountered, or point to useful lines of research. The lines in the sand drawn by whoever do not truly reflect reality and cannot helpfully demark consistent differences. Such arbitrary demarcations are, by their very nature, socially constructed and bound by time and circumstances. It must be admitted, however, that the failure of binaries and socially constructed categories to be predictive is very troublesome to sociologists because we have made a living from using them for generations! But, whether we like it or not, religious identity as denoted by organisational affiliation means very little today. Perhaps other categories, other concepts, other differences will make a useful difference, but extensive research is required to discover them. Clearly, a simple, minor, refurbishment of old binaries and categories is not going to suffice.

And it is not just the domain of religion that is vastly more diverse than we had previously allowed. Recent research has revealed vast diversity in the realm of what might once simply have been called irreligion, non-religion, or the secular. As noted above, the AGZ study revealed six clusters of worldview types that cannot be reduced to a religious–non-religious binary (Singleton et al., 2018, 2019). Just as earlier research exploded the notion of modernisation being a singular, uniform, path, resulting in the idea of multiple modernisations, Martin (2016) was always aware that there were multiple secularities. The Religious Diversity Project again made this abundantly clear and is now being further interrogated by Beaman’s current project on Nonreligion in a Complex Future (NCF) (Beyer and Beaman, 2019). The problem with binaries continues and is further complexified by intersections of diversities.

Some promising processes

Social science continues to focus on the discovery of social processes. This section examines some recently identified processes.

The transformation of religion into culture and spirituality

Beyer (2020) has been working in the religious studies space analysing the changing ways religion is socially constructed and how it operates and functions, particularly with respect to the distribution of power. To summarise a carefully argued and richly exampled piece, Beyer argues that religion once operated in a Weberian way to order the lives of adherents, to manage access to power, and to provide transcendentally legitimated symbols for the state. In Europe, the Reformation rendered a singular religion to plural religions. This new plurality was manifested in decades of brutal politics and power struggles. And when peace came, following an horrendous 30 years of religious conflict, in the form of the Treaty of Westphalia, it came at the price of the exclusion of religious diversity within individual nations. A more recent (1960s) major transformation, according to Beyer (2020), was the shift from religion to religions within many states. Much European study of religious diversity focusses on this emergence of a new us versus them binary as Islam, on one hand, and those declaring ‘no religion’, on the other hand, form substantial communities. For example, the work of ISOR (Research in Sociology of Religion) (isor.cat/en/home) examines the increase in diversity caused by the rise in the numbers of religious groups. And the Critical Analysis of Religious Diversity (CARD) Network (Kühle et al., 2018) have raised similar issues particularly focussing on the methodological problems raised by increased diversity and appears to make similar criticism of existing approaches.

Beyer (2020) identifies two transformations of religions currently relegating religions to a minority status and stripping them of power. First, elements of religions are at times transformed into ‘culture’, for example, in Quebec, the Crucifix in the National Assembly was declared to be a national symbol, and one of culture. Formerly religious objects or actions are becoming increasingly associated with national or group identity, or part of remembrance. Van Der Krogt (2015) presents a similar argument for the development of inter-religious relations in New Zealand. In so doing, religion is denatured losing its transcendent anchorage and leverage, thus becoming, according to Beyer, a form of ‘non-religion’. Second, he argues that religions have become radically individualised, items of personal choice in the marketplace of spirituality, and in so doing have lost the power of formal organisation and corporate commitment. This, however, has long been, at least, a two-way street. The cross itself was originally a symbol of State terror, hymn tunes have long been borrowed from bar rooms and music halls, and so it goes.

While Beyer (2020) continues to use the empty signifier, ‘non-religion’, to point to the outcomes of these transformations he discusses, he reveals the limitations of the term by describing two distinct processes with very different outcomes that are not helpfully combined under the term of ‘non-religion’. The processes that Beyer sets out describes ‘non-religious’ outcomes for a phenomenon which is ‘religion’ only when it begins as a religion with a form that smells strongly of German Protestantism or Quebec Catholicism! That is to say, the use of the concept ‘non-religion’ absolutely requires a definition of religion, a concept of ‘religion’, something many sociologists following Weber have been loath to do, but nonetheless continue to hold particular ideas and expectations about what ‘real’ religion is, or is supposed to be. Beyer essentially takes a social-constructivist view arguing that ‘religion’ as socially defined in the past has meant beliefs (creeds), morals, clergy (ordered communities), and seeing the ordered self as integral to the social order and government.

But this framing of ‘religion’ came unstuck in the 1960s (Stolz et al., 2016), and claiming to have ‘no religion’ has become normal in the twenty-first century as the third generation after the 1960s, Generation Z, grows up with the majority declaring ‘no religion’ (Singleton et al., 2019), yet being open to the transcendent, to something more than, and having very limited energy for being anti-religion. This is a further reminder that we are dealing with a level of diversity in everyday life far greater than that which can be described by simple binaries. Similarly, Bullivant (2020) presents an analysis of the rise and institutionalisation of the sociology of non-religion which only serves to support our contention that the term is too vague and requires a definition of religion which is altogether too tied to Western Christianity. Its pursuit will not result in a productive clarification or worthy generalisations.

Second, Beyer continues to be caught in the religion–spiritual binary. While this can be defended from a social-constructivist point of view as being the way that society currently defines these phenomena, it is important that social scientists working in this area do not uncritically fall back on simplistic popular conceptualisations. Whether there ever was a drawable distinction between the religious and the spiritual, it is now neither possible nor useful to take one for granted. To be fair, many scholars in the field have made just this mistake. Bellah, for example, ridiculed spirituality, decrying it as ‘Sheilaism’ – whatever an individual wanted it to be (Bellah et al., 1985). Nevertheless, when common practices described as spirituality are examined in practice, invariably a web of organised support structures, modes of corporate production, a plethora of products, and people uniting to effect change beyond themselves readily emerges as is evident in Ammerman’s (2013) research on the subject which concludes that religion and spirituality are not so very different after all. Meanwhile, of course, a religion without a lively spirituality of any kind is dead. Once again, a false dichotomy is presented as a simple way of analysing a phenomenon that is much more complex than is acknowledged resulting in a blinding of the researcher to things happening across the whole area and to commonalities which are interwoven in complex and changing ways. This is reflected in that while 22% of Australian teens in the AGZ study said they were ‘spiritual but not religious’, 16% identified as both ‘religious and spiritual’ (Singleton et al., 2019).

A social-constructivist approach has the additional problem of empowering the past, established, and traditional to define the present and shape the future. It is the powerful who socially construct and are able to insist on their construction. The protests of those opposed to acknowledging and accepting sexuality and gender diversity make this clear. Just as do the legal definitions of religion in policies designed to govern religious diversity. To qualify for recognition as a religious group in Australia, and secure exemption from paying tax, a group must believe in a higher power or God, have a system of ethics, and must have a number of local groups organised and represented by a head office. This control by framing is all too common. It was precisely this sort of social construction that declared that the Indigenous population of Australia had no religion. After all, it had no head office, no bishops, no written creed; how could it be, thus, preventing the capacity to see and appreciate what was/is there. Social science needs to ground its descriptions and explanations in evidence, authority grounded in research, not in catchy imagery, or ideology, or constructions, that in this case emerge largely from a Western, European context. This adds an extra problematic dimension to the debate, particularly as contemporary sociology of religion seeks to decolonise and decentre itself from Europe and the United States (Bouma, 2003; Burchardt and Becci, 2016; Hedges, 2020; Spickard, 2019; Woo, 2019).

Beyer’s analysis fits in the secularisation literature as a careful description of some of the ways social change has reduced, or removed some of the former power of religion. While head offices bewail their loss of power and influence, a common mistake made both by religious leaders and governments, however, is to presume that the former power inhered chiefly in the organisational forms – clergy, prelates, and so on – rather than realising the powerful force of spiritual practice among the people and the production of moral frames within households. Lived religion and spirituality, even in this age of individualism, are not fundamentally individual, but corporate, shared, and socially organised, just differently done (McGuire, 2008; Woodhead, 2012). Where researchers are ideologically committed to individualism, however, then only individuals will be seen. Nails abound to one wielding a hammer!

To be fair, it needs to be acknowledged that Beyer’s analysis does help us to understand the reaction of the former ‘mainline’ religious groups to the late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century realities. In Australia, aside from the states of Queensland and New South Wales, all religious communities exist as demographic minorities. And even where Christians can claim a very slim majority – as in Queensland and New South Wales – this may disappear in the 2021 census. In any case, ‘Christians’ are very divided among themselves, as are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, and Buddhists. Christians no longer play a central role in the distribution of power; indeed, many have become sects – reacting against a social order that they see as outside, and against them, rather than working from within. This makes sense of the internal disputes within Anglicanism – with Evangelicals proudly enjoying sectarian roles and liberals acting as a voice outside the society clamouring for justice, both doing so alongside as minority players. In this context, well-organised minority groups can exercise great influence. Blaine (2020) outlines the rise to powerful influence of the Pentecostal Hillsong movement in Australian politics and social policy through the strategic placement of like-minded people. This is of course also happening in many other contexts in both similar and different ways, including the United States, Brazil, and parts of Africa, at times with devastating effects on other diversities, including gender, sexuality, and ‘other’ cultural and religious diversities.

Superdiversity, plurality, and complexity

In the light of this, it is easy to see why some advance concepts of superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007) and ‘religious superdiversity’ (Burchardt and Becci, 2016; Stringer, 2014) to describe the developments of the twenty-first century. The concept superdiversity correctly identifies that the seeds of current diversity can be clearly seen emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also useful as it is free of binaries either implied or real and forces the user to be open at all times to there being more diversity, and more diversities than immediately meet the eye, or are familiar. As Burchardt and Becci (2016: 1) state, research into diversity must ‘recognize the internal diversity of practices, identities and epistemologies that are grouped under the label of religion’. They conclude that ‘locally grounded and historically crystallizing layers of religious expression and especially their interconnectedness articulate … formations of religious superdiversity’ (Burchardt and Becci, 2016: 6).

Once critically examined in the light of data, each element in a diversity seems to decompose into more diversities, or be seen to become even further diversified by its intersection with other diversities. For example, religion and spirituality mean very different things to people of differing ages, genders, ethnic origins, personal experience, and so on. While in an earlier age, the forces of social construction may have more clearly patterned a persons’ responses to questions of identity, belief, or practice, that is no longer the case. Diversities no longer stack or clump together as neatly as they seemed to do in the last century. But even in earlier ages of greater confessional conformity, and publicly agreed upon certainties, it is likely that privately held convictions and beliefs, along with practices behind closed doors, were in fact much more diverse than the religious organisations would have acknowledged.

To Baumann (2000), the emergence and effects of this superdiversity can be described in the language of fluidity. Liquid modernity is a phrasing that is seductively poetic but it ultimately does not provide substantial theoretical or scientific leverage. The fluidity described is not subject to the laws of fluid mechanics and dynamics. It is merely an heuristic device, an imaginative tool to help one to see and recognise, but not to analyse and come to understand it better. In this vein, Woodhead (2016a) offers the concept of multiple pluralisms. This provocative phrasing forces us to confront the challenge of describing superdiversity but perhaps it is better to acknowledge that we do not have multiple pluralisms so much as multiple pluralities – isms are, after all, ideologies. Nevertheless, the concept of multiple pluralities does have much appeal as it is, at least, free of binaries and encumbering references to a past. Similarly, Furseth (2018b) applied complexity theory to her and her Nordic Colleagues’ study of religious diversity, arguing that ‘religious complexity’ best describes contemporary religion, given that ‘seemingly contradictory trends’, of ‘religious decline, growth, and change’ are happening concurrently (Furseth, 2018a: 16). These include a decline in individual religiosity, but also a growth in religious diversity, an increasing interest in alternative spirituality and ‘public visibility of religion’ and a continuity of religion’s presence in the public sphere (Furseth, 2018c: 292–293).

We keep encountering the use of the concepts superdiversity, plurality, and complexity, in our research on worldviews diversity in Australia and study of inter-religious relations. We have long had to recognise that behind each label, each separate religious and/or spiritual community, each organisational bulwark fenced off from the rest, there was, in reality, a host of internal diversity. Recognising this, we suggest that the concept of worldview complexity, rather than religious complexity, could be another helpful way forward building on frameworks of superdiversity, multiple pluralities, and religious complexity, given that it is a non-binary term that encompasses a range of religious, spiritual, and non-religious worldviews, and intersecting worldviews also of gender, sexuality, and multispecies diversities. We do so, informed by our research on the complex worldviews of Generation Z (Halafoff et al., 2020; Singleton et al., 2018, 2019, 2021), and worldview education (Lipiäinen et al., 2020), and also Taves’s (2020) argument for a shift from Religious Studies to Worldview Studies.

As sociologists of religion, we tend to see everything as religion or religion-like, and yet, as has been set out above, a narrow Western European concept of religion, or binary concepts of religion and secular, or religion and non-religion, in no way adequately capture the multiple and intersectional diversities occurring in multiple contexts. Even this, however, is but a stopgap, as worldview is a Western term loaded with baggage. Consequently, we acknowledge that alternate terms need to be considered alongside it, and we are not thereby proposing any new grand concept or theory, but rather a more inclusive lens to think through some of these patterns with.

At the same time, amid this growing recognition of complex diversity, there are repeated glimpses of deeper elements of commonality. As Halafoff (2017) has noted in her musings on retreat centres and whale watching with reference to McGuire’s (2008) work on Lived Religion, Woodhead’s (2016b) observations on ‘world repairing’, and Beaman’s (2017a, 2017b) research on turtle rescue and Deep Equality, there does appear to be something happening ‘beneath religion’ that draws people to activities and experiences that evoke awe and wonder, an awareness of interdependence, bliss, and peace, often linked with precarity and incertitude. At times, we actively seek these encounters and at other times, we feel that they rise up to meet us – that they are revealed to us in troubled times when seeking answers and meaning. The fast pace, pressures, risks, and current crises, including climate change and coronaviruses, are triggers for us to need to slow down, to take better care of ourselves and others, to come together in unexpected ways and form unexpected alliances to heal ourselves and the lifeworld, and to find new ways of living and being well together (Halafoff, 2021). As Butler (2015) states,

If I am to lead a good life, it will be a life lived with others, a life that is no life without those others … whoever I am will be transformed by my connections with others, since my dependency on another, and my dependability, are necessary in order to live and to live well. Our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of a liveable life. (p. 218)

In reality, we have been doing this forever, trying to make sense of the human and natural worlds and of multispecies relations within them. These seem to be innately human, or dare we say, natural patterns and processes that can then be labelled as religious, spiritual, or non-religious frameworks, worldviews, and movements that take multiple and myriad forms. Given our increasingly globalised and interconnected world, we are more aware of their diversity and intersectionality now than ever, especially in the face of global crises events. Once again, this diversity and interdependence are manifest qualities of the natural world and all forms of life that inhabit it. They are embodied multispecies qualities.

Discussion

What we have discovered in examining recent attempts to re-conceptualise religious diversity are, often, descriptive pieces. Occasionally, heuristic devices do provide valuable insight, or provide some limited grasp on the findings described, but they are inherently inadequate. Similar difficulties in conceptualising the ‘religious’, let alone religious diversity, in European thought are reported (Servais et al., 2020). What is clear is that binary labelling does not help this process, and that much more complex explanations are required. But there is more; another approach entirely. Under the welter of diversity some see a procrustean bed of capacity to wonder, awe, respect which leads to compassion and action. Substantial numbers of people, including many Australians, report having experiences of wonder, awe, encounter, which cannot be explained (Hay, 1990; Hay and Morisy, 1978; Hood, 1995; Pepper and Powell, 2016; Rice, 2003). These capacities and experiences are prior to or outside of formal religious contexts and often go unreported due to fear of ridicule. These can be seen as the building blocks which get colonised by religious movements and organisations, which in turn keep some of it alive, develop disciplines and traditions drawing on them, and control them often seeking to profit from them for their own good. But this does not deliver us from the challenges of diversity. The moment such deep experiences are shared, they are, of necessity, shaped by culture, context, and language. Given that these identities and experiences no longer pile up in ways to produce singularity, or simple differences but are in themselves very diverse and which in intersection become even more so, a diversity of diversities would seem to be the most accurate starting point for conceptualising worldview diversity today.

Other research projects examining different forms of worldview diversity report increased diversity but do not move beyond pre-existing categories. For example, Cadge et al.’s (2017) work on sacred spaces, chaplaincy, and spirituality produces pictures of diversity and stories of professionals and managers trying to deal with the diversity. Yet, both researchers and those seeking to manage it remain in binary conceptualisations and competitive modes. The story of chaplaincy work richly illustrates the problems as some hold on to old institutional forms, labels, and practices while others seek to produce a new profession of well-being generalists. These policy and practice issues challenge old binaries.

In a sense, we come to a similar place after this critical review that Asad arrived at in 2009 following a similarly critical review of anthropological approaches to Islam (Asad, 2009). Finding that diversity overwhelmed or made essentialist reductions of those approaches, he proposed that religions be viewed as discourses shaping and being shaped by context and history. Discourses and worldviews are very similar and remind us of Hervieu-Léger’s (2000) concept of religions as chains of memory again recreated in each iteration, being fluid, dynamic, and processual. While worldview, discourse, and memory readily are over cerebralized in Western thought, they are much more complex, nuanced, and rich than that.

Finally, the sociology of religion has for far too long confused its subject matter with the most formally organised aspect of the religious institution (Bouma, 1998). The gaze needs to be widened, by fresh reporting of what is actually happening, and what people are really doing. A gaze not limited by binaries, expectations based on modern, Western, nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences, but on fresh explorations at all levels.

Conclusion

The diversity of religious diversities is profuse and profound. No overarching explanatory framework or classificatory system has yet been found. At the same time, it is clear that the old binaries are decidedly inadequate. Observing, recording, and reporting are valuable, as are programmes promoting education for mutual understanding and respect. These suggest that it is possible that a rewarding path may be found in turning the gaze from the superstructures of diversity and attending to the substrate that appears, in some form, to be common to each and all vital worldviews, meaning systems and religions. Given that such capacities and experiences must be immediately refracted through personal, social, and cultural diversity, this is unlikely to result in a path to any form of uniformity. But while explanations of diverse framings and experiences should not be allowed to result in lazy, reductionist, binaries, or other crude, normative impositions, nor should we give up attempts to look for patterns to understand and interpret.

It might be helpful to start with labels but we should not be satisfied merely with naming things. With humility, respect, and unceasing effort, the acknowledgement of rich and complex intersecting worldview diversity and complexity can also yield a deeper critical understanding of our common humanity and interconnectedness with the entire lifeworld, and how to live well together.