Abstract
Faith Stories examines the connections between religion, culture and everyday life. The book presents the results of an empirical research based on art workshops with children in which the author explored ‘their attachments to religion, social values and ‘what really matters’’ (p. 4), as well as on focus groups and interviews with parents aimed at examining themes of identity, religion and belonging. This research was conducted in several postcolonial multicultural metropolitan areas in England and Australia where Christian religions coexist with other religions, and in which policy agendas are using racist strategies to promote cultural fear: Manchester, London, West Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide. What participants have in common is faith.
Faith is understood in the study as a polysemic word and concept, which ranges from having confidence in other people and in the value of life, to having a religious faith expressed through belonging to a religious community. Hickey-Moody defines it as ‘an ontological state, an orientation and a capacity to act’ (p. 15), that is, material: it is made up of ‘a set of practices, an embedded emotional geography that choreographs subjectivities and communities’ (p. 15). The author advances a compelling intersectional approach that goes beyond the well-known trilogy of gender, class and race. She explores the ‘intersections between religion and culture, between class, race and faith, between material cultures and attachment’ (p. 16). Hickey-Moody’s materialist approach has its roots in Spinoza, Braidotti, and Deleuze, among many other authors, and emphasises a practical approach to faith, as ‘a way of being a person and belonging to a community’ (p. 25). The book insists on this perspective, which – instead of theoretical approaches and an analysis of religions as institutions – draws attention to people’s faith practices associated with their commitment to communities and cultural values.
Hickey-Moody adopts what she calls a decolonial feminist new materialist methodology, inspired in part by Walter Mignolo, but drawing more substantially on the work of Rosi Braidotti, since she is interested mostly in an affirmative ethics of generative scholarship. She contests both Mignolo’s understanding of contemporary Europe as a homogeneous continent and his call for a distinction between postcolonial and decolonial. According to Hickey-Moody, ‘decolonial theory needs to avoid creating false binaries between a historicised “Europe” and decolonial ‘other’’ (p. 65), because, on the one hand, there are parts of Europe, such as the Republic of Ireland, that were also colonised and, on the other hand, colonisation is not confined to Europe. In that sense, she calls for the need to ‘listen for the voices of decolonial subjects in both “colonised” and “colonising” places’ (p. 65).
This approach has proven instrumental in generating nuanced and thought-provoking insights. Through her empirical research, Hickey-Moody came to realise that there are different ways of belonging to communities, which may be the outcome of experiencing exclusion from other communities, resulting in a state of being simultaneously inside and outside”. For immigrants, this may mean being inside a virtual community through social media platforms that connect them with their families, maintaining strong attachments to transnational communities, something that, at the same time, makes apparent their exclusion from offline communities where they are discriminated against. The book goes deep into the analysis of this polysemic notion of belonging and of the possibilities of building common ways of belonging that “can destabilise prejudice and stereotyping” (p. 101). Faith plays an important role in this process: it may help to overcome ethnic differences not only because there is a shared religious experience, but also because faith as such also means trusting other people. However, faith and religious belonging may also play a disruptive role as has happened with the representation of “a Muslim community” in liberal multiculturalism and identity politics: ethnic background and religion have been used as identity labels which homogenise people marked by diversity, serve to exclude them from the surrounding community and reinforce prejudice towards them.
The divide between belonging/not belonging, being connected/being in a bubble that protects yet simultaneously may result in discrimination, is framed in the discussion on the legacies of colonialism; Hickey-Moody links the remains of England’s and Australia’s colonial past with contemporary Islamophobic and racist discourses and policies in the context of the ‘war on terror’. However, the author goes beyond the established scholarship on coloniality and securitization by exploring other perspectives to discuss the system of othering that re-inscribes White privilege. Mentioning the experience of her own family, she points out how older people, accustomed to a world that no longer exists, feel estranged by the reality of changing spaces that are being replaced and utilised in new ways. This may contribute to a generation gap, as older White generations may develop a ‘great feeling of sadness’ (p. 158), which tends to be ignored by younger generations, and by people coming from other parts of the world. According to the author, ‘[s]ystems of attachment, old and new, can’t simply be discarded or replaced’ (p. 158). The fact that there is no room to express this sadness, this nostalgia for a world that no longer exists, may develop in older generations a resentment towards and a resistance against change.
Hickey-Moody sees education as playing a pivotal role in addressing and contributing towards overcoming these tensions: it should play a relevant role in explaining the roots of colonial representations, but also in shedding light on past examples of the peaceful coexistence of different populations, such as the trade between Turkish Muslims and Indigenous Australian people prior to British colonisation. Moreover, education should engage with the feelings of sadness experienced both by older White generations and by migrants, and their different feelings of being left aside.
Faith Stories is also a useful book for understanding the intertwining of class with ethnicity, religion, materiality, Whiteness, and gender. Hickey-Moody examines how the divide based on economic capacities exists within migrant communities and is expressed in terms of geographic belonging, values, or levels of education. Refuting the pervasive perception of migrants as homogeneously dispossessed people, the author writes,
the difference in migration stories is stark, and includes people who have spent seven to eleven years in Italy after fleeing war in Afghanistan, and now live in England with an Italian passport, to others who have travelled across the sea from Afghanistan on a refugee boat and been detained on Christmas Island, before being released to live in Melbourne, to others who have fled religious persecution in Palestine, Bosnia or Iraq. (p. 168)
In these cases, religion can play a decisive role in silencing the class differences: even if these people do not consider religious belonging to be relevant to their identity, it plays a crucial role in the formation of solidarities and the radicalisation of divides. In summary, for Hickey-Moody, religion, class, migration, gender, and inequality may intersect in different ways, but ‘they are brought together by the feeling of being left out that people experience when they are outside changing contours of culture’ (p. 191). The experience of exclusion is also referenced in the case study of two families of White, Christian, lesbian mothers. However, these experiences are mostly articulated in terms of nationality, class, race and gender in general. Actually, it would have been interesting to explore this issue further.
Finally, a major contribution of Hickey-Moody’s research relates to children’s experiences of faith: How do children dream of other worlds? What do they think really matters? Some of the children involved in the study are haunted by their terrifying experiences of escaping in precarious boats, witnessing violence, struggling with low self-esteem. If the empirical research presented in the book shows the relevance of football and ice creams to them, it is also striking to see how they express their fear of homelessness, and violence. In what can be read as a generation gap issue, it is impressive to see the importance children give to climate change.
With this book, Hickey-Moody offers a valuable contribution to ‘highlighting the significance of quotidian meanings in religion, spirituality and community’ (p. 194). As a study which explores the role of faith in social transformation and the common good, it is especially pertinent for those interested in issues not only of religion, but also racism, multiculturalism, citizenship, democracy, education, women’s and LGBT+’s rights and the environment. The richness of Hickey-Moody’s findings should encourage researchers to study religions through the lens of believers’ faith practices and the cultural meanings of these practices in relation to the formation of believers’ identities.
