The sacred in the modern world: a psychosocial approach

This project will explore how sociological concepts of the sacred can make an important contribution to the academic study of contemporary society, as well as wider public discourse about our understanding of deeply-significant meanings, values and relationships. The term 'sacred' is sometimes treated as synonymous with 'religion', but this project will explore an alternative understanding of the sacred originating from the work of Emile Durkheim in which the sacred is understood as a symbol, value, idea or person which is regarded as being of profound significance, and in relation to which emotionally-laden social bonds and practices are forged.

Developing a sociological theory of the sacred has significant potential to clarify the focus of the sociology of religion in the West. Since the 1960's, a primary concern in this discipline has been how to understand the study of 'religion' in societies in which increasing numbers of people have little or no meaningful contact with traditional religious institutions or practices. This has led to a wide range of theoretical and empirical studies examining new religious movements, the 'new age', neo-Paganism and Wicca, as well as different forms of spirituality beyond insitutional religion. Whilst valuable, the networks and practices analysed in this literature tend to involve only a very small proportion of the population, often smaller than those involved in traditional religions. By contrast, a sociological understanding of the sacred can provide a conceptual language for analysing socially significant meanings, values and relationships that are embedded into key social structures such as public media and the legal-system, and with which significant parts of Western populations are engaged.

The project will examine how ideas of the sacred have been developed in fields beyond the study of religion, particularly in cultural sociology, anthropology and media studies, whilst also considering how recent work in religious studies on religion and intersubjectivity, and the cultural mediation of religion, might generate richer understandings of the sacred in these other disciplines. It will give particular attention to the intersubjective significance of relations with sacred figures, to the historical contingency of sacred forms, to the key role of contemporary media as a structure through which forms of the sacred are rehearsed and contested, and to the possibilities and challenges of collective forms of the sacred in pluralist societies. Case examples discussed through the project will include the significance of the collective, mediated mourning of the death of public figures such as Anna Lindh and Pym Fortuyn, the emergence of the sacrality of the care of children as a key form of the sacred in Western societies which has to a significant degree displaced traditional religious sources of authority, and the ways in which controversy over the BBC's decision not to broadcast the DEC Gaza appeal demonstrates tensions in the role of public media in rehearsing sacred values whilst also maintaining impartiality.

In addition to its academic outputs, the project will also seek to encourage engagement with such a sociological understanding of the sacred amongst a range of public audiences through media outputs and other events. This conceptual langugage provides a useful framework for thinking about the roots and implications of our deepest commitments, for identifying operative forms of the sacred in contemporary culture, and for moving beyond simplistic binaries of religion and the secular in defining significant motive-forces in contemporary social life. By introducing these concepts to wider public audiences, this project therefore has the potential to create a framework for a new kind of public reflection about the implications of living in a society characterised by multiple, intersecting and conflicting forms of the sacred.

There is considerable interest and concern across a range of public audiences about the nature and possibilities of collective meanings and values in contemporary society. Behind public debates on issues such as citizenship; religion, atheism and secularism; the demoralization of society; the challenges of religious and cultural pluralism; religious fundamentalism and 'radicalization'; and the sources of public meaning in increasingly de-Christianised societies, lie more fundamental questions about what collective meanings and values operate in contemporary society, and whether these have the potential to bind people into a constructive social order or degenerate into on-going conflict and violence. Whilst these questions have become a primary focus for a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, they also find expression in political debates and policy initiatives, as well as mediated public discussions ranging from issues of blaspemy and freedom of speech to whether football or clubbing constitutes a new form of 'religion' in an increasingly secularised society.

A central aim of this fellowship is to encourage the use of the concept of the sacred as a way of framing public discussion around these fundamental issues of collective meanings, values and relationships. This conceptual language (when detached from the simple association of the 'sacred' with 'religion') has the potential to enable people to reflect on their most profound commitments which often elude such reflection through being so deeply embedded in the cultural and emotional structures of contemporary subjectivities. In doing so, it has the potential to create a conceptual framework for thinking about how forms of the sacred are not universal and timeless, but historically-contingent and socially-performed, as well as the implications of this for the forms of sacred that we wish to nurture through collective social and cultural practices. It also has the potential to create a conceptual space in which profound commitments can be thought about in a way that does not immediately revert to simplistic binaries of religion and the secular, in which it is assumed that the core values of religious and secular lives are both self-evident and inevitably antagonistic. By introducing this conceptual language of the sacred into discussions across a range of public contexts, the project can also stimulate more specific questions such as where we find compelling representations of the sacred in contemporary media and culture, and the nature and possibility of shared public sacred space in contemporary pluralist society.

To achieve this aim of introducing this conceptual language to a range of public audiences, this project will therefore involve:

i) writing of a short popular book, presenting key ideas from the academic monograph produced through this project for a wider non-academic audience
ii) the production of a programme or short programmes for BBC Radio 4 on the sacred in contemporary culture
iii) a series of film screenings, framed by the project's conceptual language of the sacred, at which public figures discuss the representation of the sacred in particular films
iv) holding a seminar/workshop with a leading think-tank with strong links to policy-makers and others involved in different forms of public and cultural life on the sacred in a culturally pluralist society, supported by that think-tank's own strong dissemination structures.