Public religion and urban space in Europe

Abstract

Conflicts related to demographic and cultural change in Europe regularly find their expression in struggles over the presence and visibility of religious buildings and groups. As this editorial argues, these conflicts can best be understood from a postsecular perspective that takes into account overlapping and diverging histories of state-formation and secularization. The papers collected for this special issue on public religion and urban space demonstrate that many of the difficulties that European societies face in accommodating religious diversity stem from historically formed relationships between national political identities and religious identities. In many European cases, secularization did not entail a fundamental separation between religion and politics but the formal establishment of one single national church or two competing ones, but territorially based national churches. One of the consequences of these types of establishments is that certain religious traditions are generally described and experienced as fitting with the nation and others are not. The contributors to this special issue show in detail that the struggles of contemporary religious movements in Europe to become present in the public domain are related to commonly accepted understandings of where and how religion should manifest itself in the urban environment, based on the public life of religious traditions that are considered part of the nation.

Understanding the geographies of religion and secularity: on the potentials of a broader exchange between geography and the (post-) secularity debate

“…3. A number of authors use the notion post-secularity to designate a paradigmatic shift that denaturalises secularity and thus makes it possible to analyse the contingencies, historicities, and geographies of secularity in a manner inspired by Foucauldian perspectives and often builds on the discussion by Asad of formations of the secular (see Oosterbaan, 2014;Barbieri, 2015;Gökarıksel and Secor, 2015;Molendijk, 2015;Fordahl, 2016;Parmaksız, 2018). Such a shift enables a thematic opening of the social sciences and the humanities towards the always specific configurations of secularity and religion (see for example the discussion by Hancock (2008) on spatialities of the secular) and the relation of religion and secularity to questions of power, identity, and politics.…”

Postsäkulares Placemaking im oberpfälzischen Konnersreuth: Sakralisierung, Kulturerbe, Eigensinn

“…Das "Postsäkulare" wird gemeinhin als anhaltende Prä-senz des Religiösen innerhalb säkularisierter Sozialstrukturen der Gegenwart verstanden, die die Gleichsetzung von Modernisierung mit Säkularisierung obsolet macht und Fragen nach den Möglichkeiten eines Zusammenlebens von Religiösen, Humanisten und Säkularisten in einer pluralen Gesellschaft stellt (Molendijk et al, 2010). Geographische Theorien des Postsäkularen nehmen meist religiös-politische Konstellationen im urbanen Raum europäischer Metropolen in den Blick, um öffentliche Religion als treibende Kraft in räumlichen, sozialen und politischen Transformationsprozessen darzustellen (ebd., Oosterbaan, 2014;Beaumont et al, 2011). Das Postsäkulare erscheint dabei als stets vorläu-figes Resultat einer Auseinandersetzung mit der Diversität und kulturellen Pluralität urbanen Lebens (Gökarıksel and Secor, 2015).…”

Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism

“…A postsecular perspective may help us recognize the historical entanglements between specific modern nation states and particular religious traditions and the detailed ways in which ‘the religious' and ‘the secular' have developed as mutually constitutive categories in particular contexts ( cf . Oosterbaan, ).…”