Grace Davie and religious literacy: Undoing a lamentable quality of conversation

Grace Davie and religious literacy: Undoing a lamentable quality of conversation内容摘要：

Grace Davie and Religious Literacy: undoing a lamentable quality of conversation Adam Dinham Commenting on the Religion and Society Programme’s Westminster Faith Debates, which placed academics, politicians, policy makers and religious leaders in dialogue with the wider public, Grace Davie has observed ‘a constant plea for more work on religious literacy’.i This chapter picks up on this theme, taking up the distinctive approach of chapter four (by Matthew Francis), to examine how Grace Davie’s thinking is being taken forward more widely, this time through the idea of religious literacy, which she has done so much to support. In exploring the interaction of Davie’s ideas with my own in this area, the chapter will explore what Davie thinks religious literacy is, as well as why it is needed, concluding that it is a contested, situation-specific notion which might best be understood in contrast to its opposite – as Davie puts it, ‘a debate that is both ill-mannered and ill-informed’. ii Davie’s repeated observation in conference papers and in conversation that ‘there is a lamentable quality of conversation about religion, just as we need it most’iii is a central part of the religious literacy approach which has emerged within the UK’s Religious Literacy Programme. Davie comments that At precisely the moment that British people need them most, they are losing the vocabulary, concepts and narratives that are necessary to take part in serious conversation about religion.iv Thus, more recently she has begun to reference religious literacy in her writing too, noting in the foreword to our my new book with Matthew Francis that “I am deeply committed to the notion of religious literacy as such”. v For Davie the essential question to ask is whether or not it is possible to reverse the decline in religious knowledge that has enveloped British society, and which has became damaging to public discussion. Indeed, in her view, it is not only the recovery of the conversation that matters, but the degree of its urgency. This chapter aims to draw together Davie’s contributions, not only to the understanding of religions, therefore, but moreover to how they cohere for her as a basis for restoring and developing the religious literacy of a public sphere which has struggled to talk well about them. Grace Davie and Understanding Religion in Modern Britain It goes almost without saying that Grace Davie has contributed enormously to the understanding of religion in modern Britain. That is, indeed, one of the tenets of this book. The popularity of her concept of ‘believing without belonging’ is, of course, a major landmark in the study of religion, and its uses have, as this volume amply demonstrates, both surprised and frustrated her in equal measure. More recently her introduction of the idea of vicarious religion has provided a much-needed nuancing in the debate about what is happening to religion and belief.vi She illustrates this by taking the examples of Princess Diana, and Jade Goodyvii, each involving untimely deaths, observing that: These are moments when the ‘secular’ routines of life are suspended, when – to put the same point in a different way – the abnormal (the articulation of religion in words and actions) becomes at least for a short time normal. For this reason alone they merit careful sociological attention viii She thinks these indicate the continuing importance of the presence of religion and belief, even without their regular, committed practices. The spaces are important, just for being there, even if most people don’t know it, most of the time. Indeed, she goes on to quote the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who notes a subtly different kind of ‘vicarious’ presence – and one which has presumably been sometimes unwelcome to him, as a number of unpleasant media run-ins on the matters he refers to suggest. He writes: It has sometimes been said in recent years that the Church of England is still used by British society as a stage on which to conduct by proxy the arguments that society itself does not know how to handle. It certainly helps to explain the obsessional interest in what the Church has to say about issues of sex and gender.ix Davie quietly cautions against over-extending distinctions, and over- operationalizing the ideas, despite the temptations to both. For her, typically, ‘vicarious religion’ identifies a perspective on religious decline which does not seek to explain everything, bu