Abstract
The increase in nonreligion is frequently juxtaposed against that which has declined. In the societies on which we are focusing in this volume this means traditional Christian majoritarianism. However, in this chapter I argue that such a juxtaposition both misses important aspects of the picture and constructs a binary between nonreligion and Christianity which fails to capture the complex ways in which people live their lives. Specifically, in everyday life social actors draw from a number of meaning-making frames. This meaning-making takes place in the context of an invigorated diversity that includes institutional religion, sometimes in new forms such as ‘extra-institutional religion’ (Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; Religious Practice in a Post-Catholic Ireland: Towards a Concept of ‘Extra-Institutional Religion’. Social Compass, 66, 471–487, 2019); nonreligion in its many forms (atheist, agnostic, spiritual but not religious (SBNR), indifferents, humanists); the accelerated presence of migrant religions; and a renewed presence of Indigenous spiritualities (Beaman, Recognize the New Religious Diversity. Canadian Diversity, 14, 17–19, 2017a). Negotiating and navigating this terrain, in addition to a broader ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec, Super-Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30, 1024–1054, 2007; Talking Around Super-Diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42, 125–139, 2019), is part of living in a complex society and living well together.
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Notes
- 1.
See Dilmaghani (2018) for a study of the links between religiosity and environmental philanthropy based on a nationally representative Canadian survey.
- 2.
This point reflects a research finding of REDCo, an international research project headed by Wolfram Weisse (2012) that explored the topic of religion and education. When participating students were asked “There are people from different religions living in every country. What do you think would help them to live together in peace?” They consistently answered: “if they do something together”. Another stream of research supports the theory that intergroup contact can improve social relations and reduce prejudice, as first proposed by Gordon Allport in the 1950s in The Nature of Prejudice (1954). See Hodson and Hewstone (2013) for a more recent elaboration on intergroup contact, including indirect forms of contact, and its ability to reduce prejudice.
- 3.
Mary Jo Neitz (2009, p. 357) states: “A task for us as researchers and as citizens is to encourage a politics of encounter aimed at understanding that we are not all the same, but to believe that it is possible to work together across our differences”.
- 4.
I have come to call the people involved in sea turtle conservation ‘sea turtlers’. They do not self-describe as conservationists, activists, volunteers, or environmentalists.
- 5.
Few Christian writers are able to relinquish human superiority in their discussions of the environment and non-human animals. While many reject the concept of human dominion over nature, they still insist on stewardship which is a fundamentally hierarchical formulation of human/non-human animal relations. Two works which show the possibility of a Christian move away from such a hierarchy are Sarah McFarland Taylor (2007b) and Willis Jenkins (2013).
- 6.
This is not to say that these are not themes or values taught by Christianity, but certainly equality of human and non-human animal life is not part of most Christian repertoires. At best ‘equal but different’ would characterize that relationship.
- 7.
A limited number of responses to the environmental crisis have accounted for nonreligion. One example is that of Haydn Washington (2018), who argues that a ‘sense of wonder towards nature’ is needed to solve the environmental crisis. This feeling is inherently spiritual and can be experienced by the religious and nonreligious alike.
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Beaman, L.G. (2021). Collaboration Across Difference: New Diversities and the Challenges of Our Times. In: Beaman, L.G., Stacey, T. (eds) Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72881-6_10
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