Implementing the Regulation on Places of Worship in Indonesia: New Problems,Local Politics and Court Action

This article examines the local implementation of the national Joint Regulation 2006 on places of worship in Indonesia. It focuses on the case study of the Protestant Christian Batak Congregation, which became one of the first churches to successfully challenge the authority of a local leader to cancel its permit to build a church. I begin by exploring the history of the regulation of permits for places of worship in Indonesia and the various proposals for law reform that have been put forward since 1998. I then outline the provisions of the new Joint Regulation and highlight the ongoing problems for religious minorities at the local level because of the failure of local authorities to implement the national regulation. I will demonstrate how religious minorities are challenging the decisions of local authorities by complaining to independent watchdogs, taking court action and using the political process. In conclusion, I argue that the Protestant Christian Batak Congregation court case is part of a broader trend for local authorities to use conflict over places of worship as an opportunity for political gain in the highly competitive political atmosphere since the downfall of Suharto in 1998.     

‘God was with me everywhere’: women’s embodied practices and everyday experiences of sacred space in Czechia

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the rise. We deploy auto-photography as a method that invites participants’ own visual representations and interpretative narrations of their quotidian experiences. Thirty-eight Christian, Buddhist, and non-religious women participated in this study in 2016. Our analysis of photographs and interviews shows that our participants turn places that are not primarily associated with religion or spirituality (such as a kitchen sink or a bus stop) into sacred or spiritual places while at the same time integrate officially sacred spaces (such as churches and meditation centers) into their daily lives through social activities. Thus, we argue that a mutually transformative process is taking place in contemporary Czechia. In this process, religiously affiliated and non-affiliated women alike transform everyday spaces into sacred sites through their embodied and emotional practices that seek calmness, peace, and transcendence. At the same time, women who participate in organized religions remake the sacrality of officially sacred sites through their emphasis on social connections and feelings of communal belonging and shared identity. Our findings underscore that sacred space is not fixed in any one location and its production involves the continual emotional and material investment by ordinary women.     

Duty to God/my Dharma/Allah/Waheguru: diverse youthful religiosities and the politics and performance of informal worship

This paper draws on a case study of the Scout Movement in the UK to explore the everyday, informal expressions of ‘worship’ by young people that occur outside of ‘designated’ religious spaces and the politics of these performances over time. In analysing the explicit geographies of how young people in UK scouting perform their ‘duty to God’ (or Dharma and so forth), it is argued that a more expanded concept of everyday and embodied worship is needed. This paper also attends to recent calls for more critical historical geographies of religion, drawing on archival data to examine the organisation's relationship with religion over time and in doing so contributes new insights into the production of youthful religiosities and re-thinking their designated domains.     

Shaping the sacred: light and the experience of worship in middle Byzantine churches

Abstract

Byzantine churches have been extensively studied in terms of their architectural development and in their role as places to display religious art. However there has been less research into one of the most fundamental aspects of the Byzantine ritual experience, illumination. In practical terms, churches had to be illuminated sufficiently for worship to take place. In experiential terms, lighting can be seen as the medium by which the iconographic programmes and liturgical practices were staged and enhanced. This paper considers the archaeological and textual evidence linking physical illumination of buildings with the experience of their sacred function.     

''These Untutored Masses'': The Campaign for Respectability Among White and Black Evangelicals in the American South, 1870–1930

In the post-Civil War American South, leaders of both white and black denominations sought to root out southern 'folk' religious practices from their churches. Denominational modernizers preached the middle-class virtues necessary to the building of a new southern social order: piety, sobriety and the systematic accumulation of wealth. They built bureaucracies of benevolence and conceived of 'intelligent worship' as a means of schooling their 'untutored masses' in the ways of bourgeois religiosity. In response, white and black believers, predominantly small farmers and sharecroppers with limited educations, adopted certain forms suggested by the advocates of respectable religion while also maintaining publicly emotive and physically tactile expressions of southern religiosity derived both from the camp-meeting past as well as African-derived rituals of worship. By focusing on worship practices and musical styles, this article illuminates an episode in the dialectic of traditional spirituality and bourgeois decorum in a region in, but not fully of, America.     

Post-secular geographies and the problem of pluralism: Religion and everyday life in Istanbul,Turkey

The concept of post-secularism has come to signify a renewed attention to the role of religion within secular, democratic public spheres. Central to the project of post-secularism is the integration of religious ways of being within a public arena shared by others who may practice different faiths, practice the same faith differently, or be non-religious in outlook. As a secular state within which Sunni Islam has played an increasingly public role, Turkey is a prime site for studying new configurations of religion, politics, and public life. Our 2013 research with devout Sunni Muslim women in Istanbul demonstrates how the big questions of post-secularism and the problem of pluralism are posed and navigated within the quotidian geographies of homes, neighborhoods, and city spaces. Women grapple with the demands of a pluralistic public sphere on their own terms and in ways that traverse and call into question the distinction between public and private spaces. While mutual respect mediates relations with diverse others, women often find themselves up against the limits of respect, both in their intimate relations with Alevi friends and neighbors, and in the anonymous spaces of the city where they sometimes find themselves subject to secular hostility. The gendered moral order of public space that positions devout headscarf-wearing women in a particular way within diverse city spaces where others may be consuming alcohol or wearing revealing clothing further complicates the problem of pluralism in the city. We conclude that one does not perhaps arrive at post-secularism so much as struggle with its demands.     

Women’s everyday spirituality in Diamond Way Buddhism: an auto-photographic study

The Western world is experiencing increasing popularity of new religious movements whose adherents tend to spirituality, a subjective, personal form of religion. These spiritual forms shape the spaces of everyday life, their meanings, perceptions, and experiences, which is starting to be reflected in new geographies of religion. In Czechia, one of the most rapidly growing new religious movements is Diamond Way Buddhism. This contribution focuses on how Diamond Way spirituality is lived and experienced in space. The paper explores this phenomenon using the method of auto-photography. We asked six women to photograph places important to them in their daily lives and interpret their spiritual meaning. This method allows exploration of women’s spirituality in the everyday spaces where it is perceived and experienced, such as kitchens, buses, or natural sites. The results show that women have a specific way of experiencing Buddhism in seemingly secular space which they describe through feminine characteristics of transcendence. Everyday spaces become spiritual through the subjects’ emotional and continual experiencing of Buddhism, while the officially sacred space of a Buddhist center is incorporated into everyday life activities of women. The division between sacred and secular spaces often described by scholars is therefore challenged.     

‘Highway to Heaven’: the creation of a multicultural,religious landscape in suburban Richmond,British Columbia

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.     

Public religion and urban space in Europe

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.     

Religion and Politics in the Howard Decade

The interaction between religion and politics is varied, complex and often heated. It involves constitutional issues, voting behaviour, party composition and electoral competition, faith-based public administration, advocacy and lobbying by churches, mutual criticism by churches and the state, and the public presentation of religious values. This article is a comprehensive mapping and discussion of a range of the major religion and politics issues in Australia since the election of the Howard government in 1996. This has been a decade in which religion has had a higher political profile than at any time since the 1950s Labor Split. One feature has been the rise to prominence of Catholics in the Coalition parties, whereas they featured heavily on the other side during the Labor Split. It is a more intellectually interesting decade than the 1950s because the influence of religion has crossed denominational and faith boundaries from the mainstream Christian churches to the newer Evangelical Christian churches and to non-Christian religions such as Islam. The overall impact of religious intervention appears to have favoured the Coalition parties, but many unanswered questions remain about the motivation and impact of these developments, and there are numerous opportunities for further research.     

Between Religion and Superstition: Buddhism and Daoism in Guangzhou,China, 1900–1937

This paper illustrates how Buddhist and Daoist monasteries in Guangzhou, with their legal religious status, situated themselves within the new concept of the modern nation‐state, and how the distinction between religion and superstition affected ordinary people's religious lives. There were inherent tensions between religion and the modern nation‐state, and the survival of Buddhism and Daoism was determined by their subordination to the state ideology and to political authorities’ regulation. However, the government did not regulate the form of worship in government‐approved religious sites. Due to the syncretic nature of Chinese religion, the select few of the Buddhist and Daoist monasteries in Guangzhou, with government recognition as symbols of “true religions,” paradoxically served as a protective umbrella for the people to carry on with their “superstitious” practices. At the level of praxis, the line between religion and superstition was not as distinguishable as the government had envisioned.     

古代国家都城祭祀体系与空间模式——以唐长安为例

祭祀是礼制的渊源,国家祭祀是社会礼制中最高礼仪层次,也是以礼为内核的儒教的载体,都城形成了国家祭祀体系中最为完善的地域空间,本文在建构儒教之所以成立的基础上,以唐代长安城为例,探讨了城市祭祀的等级、结构和地域空间体系,认为国家祭祀是古代都城的显性文化现象,是城市上层的精神空间的表达,是传统城市特有的一类精神文化。     

Yangjiao or the ��Other��? Christianity and Chinese society in the second half of the nineteenth century

This article explores the relationship between Christianity and Chinese society in the second half of the nineteenth century by re-examining the primary sources of anti-Christian movements. The first part shows how Christian churches broke the dominance of the Qing government over local society. Conflicts between Christianity and Chinese religion were often transformed into political confrontations between churches and the Qing bureaucracy. The second part analyzes how Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism interpreted Christianity, with an emphasis on how to understand the perception of Christianity in Chinese society. Exploring broader societal perceptions of Christianity—and not just those expressed in the writings of the Confucian literati—allows for a more nuanced understanding of Chinese interpretations of Christianity. The third part studies the relationship between churches and Chinese religious sects. On the one hand, in the language of anti-Christian movements such as those of the Zaili and Cai sects, Christianity was the hateful “Other.” On the other hand, in the process of preaching Christianity, churches themselves experienced a period of transmutation: they recruited into the church not only non-religious civilians but also the followers of popular religions. For a long period, Christianity was called yangjiao, the “foreign religion,” making it the “Other.” Missionaries started to feel an urgency to reject their identity as the “Other” after the harrowing experience of the Boxer Movement.     

Huguenot Belief and Practice in Eighteenth‐Century Paris

Protestantism was illegal in eighteenth‐century France, yet many French Reformed Protestants, better known as Huguenots, managed to maintain their religion and identity until the French Revolution granted religious freedom. Several thousand of them lived in Paris, but remained a tiny minority in a very Catholic city. Given this context, and little access to pastors or collective worship, what kind of Protestantism did they observe? This article suggests that, like other minority groups, their religious practice and thinking were influenced both by the Catholic environment in which they lived and by the culture of the late eighteenth‐century city. By 1789 they had moved away from certain Calvinist traditions, and some of them had adopted a surprising ecumenism.     

Freedom,Religion and the Making of the Modern State in Japan, 1868–89

This paper rethinks the article of religious freedom of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and calls into question the liberalist paradigm employed to understand the Constitution and modern Japanese history. In this liberalist framework, the Constitution manifests the peculiar and authoritarian nature of the pre-war Japanese state. In particular, the 28^th article, which provides for the conditional freedom of religious belief, is seen as no more than a cover for social control by the state. This paper examines the histories of the ideas of religion and freedom, and the religious freedom article, and argues that the most appropriate task is not to measure how much religious freedom the Meiji Constitution failed to guarantee against a de-historicised liberalism, but rather to consider the function of the very inclusion of religious freedom in the Constitution. I argue that the inclusion of religious freedom as a generic type of liberty in the Meiji Constitution was instrumental in the creation of the private modern individual as a subject-citizen. It is through this private individual citizen that the modern state as a public, secular authority was created.     

Unravelling Church Land: Transformations in the Relations between Church,State and Community in Uganda

Christian churches control substantial areas of land in Africa. While intensifying struggles over their holdings are partly due to the increased pressure on land in general, they also reflect transformations in the relations through which churches’ claims to land are legitimized, the increased association of churches with business, and churches’ unique positioning as both institutions and communities. This article presents the trajectory of relations between church, state and community in Uganda from the missionary acquisition of land in the colonial era to the unravelling of church landholding under Museveni. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, the authors argue that claims to church land in contemporary Uganda draw on: 1) notions of belonging to the land; 2) views about the nature of churches as communities; 3) discontent regarding whether customary land owners gave churches user rights or ownership; and 4) assessment of the churches’ success in ensuring that the land works for the common good. The article develops a novel approach to analysing the changing meaning of the landholdings of religious institutions, thus extending ongoing discussions about land, politics, development and religion in Africa.     

Imagining Humane Realism: Moving from Sacred Secularism toward a Pragmatic Theory of Human Rights

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to problematize secular humanistic conceptualizations of human rights by challenging the absolutist and supposedly irreligious foundations on which they rest. In doing so, this piece will adopt the position that secular humanism is, in fact, a religion, and, as such, its dictates concerning human beings and the proper treatment thereof are logical byproducts of a very peculiar "modern" religious faith—a religion, as it were, that places humanity at the center of its worship—and, therefore, are no less arbitrary than the overtly religious dogma it rejects. By exposing the all too confident moral authority that secular faithful bestow upon themselves and the will to judgement that is so prevalent in modern humanistic ideology, this article hopes to create a space for a re-imagining of human rights that is less authoritarian and more open to self-criticism than the modern, secular movement.     

Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in everyday mobilities: the practice of prayer and meditation in corporeal travel

This paper contributes to contemporary geographies of religion by exploring how everyday spaces of mobility and flows can be transformed through specific practices such as prayer and meditation that contribute to personal spirituality. The work challenges traditionally held assumptions that sacred space or codified religious spaces requires stillness and calmness by drawing on the New Mobilities Paradigm to explore how spiritual practices are conducted within the flows and movement that characterise contemporary everyday life. Using questionnaires and diary-interview methods, everyday journeys of participants captured how prayer, meditation and encounters with others and the environment facilitated by movement can transform and be transformed by mobility and the mode of travel. Participant’s accounts of their everyday mundane journeys reveal personalised associations of the everyday spaces that they travel through and the different routines they enact on a daily basis that incorporate religious objects, practices or ideas. These journeys and time-spaces form what I term a ‘subjective spiritual geography’, a network of the interrelated time-spaces threaded together by the individual’s schedule and routine that create, maintain and reinforce personal and informal religious meaning in everyday life.     

柬埔寨华人的土地和祖灵信仰——从“关系主义”人类学视角的考察

论文基于田野调查的结果,从人类学家王铭铭先生提出的“关系主义”人类学的视角,考察了柬埔寨华人的社区、家庭和坟地的土地神和祖灵信仰的内涵与功能,分析了柬埔寨土著文化与佛教、印度教和华人信仰等外来文化之间,内外之别、上下等级、差异和关联、延续与变迁这四对关系。认为任何宗教或文化现象都不是封闭地自我生成,而是在与他者的关系中形成。每一种文化总是处在许多其他文化组成的更大范围的场域中,在彼此的参照、混融和冲突过程中形塑自身。     

Religious experiences of stasis and mobility in contemporary Europe: undocumented Pentecostal Brazilians in Amsterdam and Barcelona

Discussions related to contemporary religious diversity in urban contexts often presume that people who form part of the public life of cities are citizens or have the right to move and dwell in the city. This article reminds us that when asking how certain religious movements become public in European cities, we also need to ask how possibilities of becoming public are tied to exclusionary citizenship regimes. By way of research among undocumented Brazilian migrants who attend Pentecostal churches, this article argues that contemporary European transformations of citizenship regimes influence religious perceptions of dwelling and movement within Europe and current experiences of urban space. The opportunities for undocumented Brazilians that allow them to move or to stay somewhere are dependent on legislation, the functioning of state institutions, the family's origins, and on contingency. In the experience of Brazilian Pentecostal adherents, acquiring legal status, to dwell or to be able to remain mobile within this assemblage of processes is dependent on their relationship with God. This article contributes to discussions in mobility studies and the geography of religion that highlight the need for more attention on mobility and stasis in relation to state actors.