Religion as/against heritage and the politics of belonging in Europe

For the panel on the assessment, definition and problematization of ‘religion’ in Europe, I propose a reflection on the increasingly influential category and phenomenon of ‘religious heritage’. Although ‘religiosity’ as Church attendance and religious belief is declining in Europe, cultural identification with religion has remained stable or even increased (Balkenhol, van den Hemel, and Stengs 2020; Davie 2006; Laniel 2016). Religious heritage has also gained a more prominent place in the political and academic agenda. Various new studies have highlighted how national and European forms of religious heritage have been ‘appropriated’ by the far right to construe a false binary between secular Christian European states on the one hand, and Islam on the other. This is intrinsically related to a politics of racial and religious exclusion: those not associated with the ‘historic nation’ or ‘European heritage’ are portrayed as a threat to societal stability or even civilization at large (Brubaker 2017; Duyvendak, Kešić, and Stacey 2022; Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy 2016; Strømmen and Schmiedel 2020). 

Studies into the relationship between the far right and religious heritage are very important. However, I think it is perhaps even more interesting and important to look at how exclusionary understandings of national and European religious heritage are also used in what we might understand as ‘mainstream’ discourses, and how they are made possible by widespread conceptual and normative assumptions about what religion is and should be. Particularly, I contend that the category of ‘heritage religion’, understanding religion as source of heritage, history and belonging (cf. Beekers 2021), is defined in contrast with ‘religion’ as doctrinal belief. The former is often understood as ‘secular’, the latter as really ‘religious’. Particularly saliently for the politics of belonging in Europe, it seems to be the case that only Christianity can make claims to a paradoxically ‘secular religious heritage’, despite the presence of Jews and Muslims in Europe’s history and present (Beaman 2021; Lauwers 2022). Conversely, not only are religious minorities mistakenly portrayed as a ‘new’ unsettling of previously homogeneous polities, they are also ‘religionized’ (cf. Moyaert 2024): the symbols, practices, values and identities of those understood as belonging to minority ‘religions’ are predominantly interpreted with a lens of ‘religiosity’, even where they are explicitly presented as cultural. Lastly, these dynamics are compounded by connotations with the concept of ‘heritage’, which invokes a focus on protection and conservation, against what is perceived as ‘new’ social change.

Discussing this pattern with examples probably takes up most of 5-7 minutes. However, it invites further discussions which could be interesting to incorporate later in the panel (or in the presentation, if there’s time), for example: could extending the category of ‘religious heritage’ to minorities help with levelling the playing field, or is the conceptual binary it relies on already partial to Christianity (cf. Asad, 1993)? Or, how do practicing/confessional Christians relate to national and European forms of religious heritage, particularly when their content is prescribed by secular actors, and can even rely on aggressive forms of secularism?

I am not yet sure which image I would show to discuss these questions, but given that the discussion on religious heritage (and what it is not) is often focused on material instances of heritage, I think finding a suitable image should be very doable.

Thank you for taking this contribution into consideration.

References

Balkenhol, Markus, Ernst van den Hemel, and Irene Stengs, eds. 2020. The Secular Sacred: Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2.

Beaman, Lori G. 2021. “The Protection of Religion as ‘Culture’ and ‘History’: Three Case Studies.” In The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom, edited by Heather J. Sharkey and Jeffrey Edward Green, 96–113. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1f88719.

Beekers, Daan. 2021. “Who Gets Excluded from ‘Christian Culture’? On Culturalised Religion, Islam and Confessional Christianity.” Alwaleed Centre Working Paper. https://religiousmatters.nl/who-gets-excluded-from-christian-culture-new....

Brubaker, Rogers. 2017. “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Moment in Comparative Perspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (8): 1191–1226. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700.

Davie, Grace. 2006. “Is Europe an Exceptional Case?” International Review of Mission 95 (378–379): 247–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6631.2006.tb00562.x.

Duyvendak, Jan Willem, Josip Kešić, and Timothy Stacey. 2022. The Return of the Native: Can Liberalism Safeguard Us against Nativism? New York: Oxford University Press.

Laniel, Jean-François. 2016. “What ‘Cultural Religion’ Says about Secularization and National Identity: A Neglected Religio-Political Configuration.” Social Compass 63 (3): 372–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768616654236.

Lauwers, A. Sophie. 2022. “Religion, Secularity, Culture? Investigating Christian Privilege in Western Europe.” Ethnicities 23 (3): 403–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968221106185.

Marzouki, Nadia, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier Roy, eds. 2016. Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion. London: Hurst & Company.

Moyaert, Marianne. 2024. Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Strømmen, Hannah, and Ulrich Schmiedel. 2020. The Claim to Christianity: Responding to the Far Right. London: SCM Press.