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THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION

IN SECULAR SOCIETY

FROM A TAKEN-FOR-GRANTED INSTITUTION TO A CONTESTED RESOURCE

James A. Beckford

Introduction

The philosophical aspects of definitions are complex and contested.

Other contributors to this collection have demonstrated how difficult,

bu t important, it is to pro duce work able definit ions of social and

cultural phenomena. Religion is no exception. It gives rise to the

same general definitional problems as do other phenomena. In addi-

tion, religion is subject to some particular, if not unique, definitional

difficulties of its own. I am not in a position to resolve these difficulties

here: I merely recognise the challenges that they present to scholarswho feel the need not only to conceptualise religion but also to

demarcate it clearly from nonreligion.

I want to throw a different light on religion and its definitions by

showing that, in certain circumstances, definitions have a broadly

politi cal significance in the sense of rela ting to struggles for power.

I am not referring to disputes about the definition of religion for

scholarly purposes but, rather, to the controversies which surround

attempts to impose official meanings on, and boundaries around,

religion in public life. The general thrust of my argument will be

that definitions can have serious practical consequences: they can

make a difference to people’s individual lives and to their collective

interests. Moreover, scholarly discussions about the definition of reli-

gion can sometimes feed into these political controversies. For exam-

ple, scholars ma y be consult ed on cont rove rsia l ques tions such as ‘Is

a “cult” really religious?’. Alternatively, scholars’ published views may

be used with out the ir knowledge in public disputes abo ut the definition

of religion.

My illustrations of definitional controversies will be taken from the

recent history of the U.K., although similar examples could easily

be found in oth er coun tries . Ind eed , a cros sna tiona l, com parative

study of such controversies would provide valuable insights into some



2 4 JAMES A. BECKFORD

of the sociological dynamics of religion. Such a study would be par-

ticularly useful if it were able to indicate the points at which reli-

gious ‘boundary disputes’ were prevalent, that is, the places where

clashes occurred between competing criteria for defining religion for

pra ctic al purp oses .

One of the advantages of examining the politics of official definitions

of religion is that it is not necessary for me to stipulate a particu-

lar definition for my own purposes. I have the luxury of being able

to work with definitions that are already given in public forms such

as laws, regulations or educational syllabuses. It goes without saying,of course, that the utility of particular definitions of religion which

are enshrined in official forms cannot be assumed or taken for granted.

The fact that they are official has no implications for their value or

usefulness. They are simply facts of social or cultural life. The task

of the social scientist is to study the methods by which such definitions

are constructed and the implications that they have for society and

culture.

Secularisation and Religious Controversies

Before I can substantiate my claim that the definition of religion is

contentious in the U.K . I ne ed to sketch the broa d outlines of the

religious changes which have taken place there since about 1945.

Many of my observations form part of the conventional account of

secularisation1 and of the privatisation of religion,2 but my interpre-

tation of these highlevel transformations is significantly different in

at least two major respects.

Firstly, I share the belief that religion is currently being restruc-

tured or repositioned in many advanced industrial societies (as well

as undergoing secularisation). The restructuring o f religion3 may be

ju st as im po rta nt to the future of these societies as to secu larisa tion.

For analytical purposes, however, these two processes of religiouschange should be kept separate.

Secondly, I believe that social and cultural changes have made

religion more contentious and controversial. This seems paradoxical,

for one might have expected that secularisation would render the

1 Dobbela ere 1981; Wilson 1985; Wilson 1992.2 Luckm ann 1963, 1967.3 HervieuLe ger 1986, 1989.

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY 25

surviving remnants of religion less, rather than more, contentious.

Very few writers have commented on this aspect of religious change,

and the literature on secularisation implies that the declining signifi-

cance of religion would entail its declining capacity to excite contro-

versy except possibly at the margins where exotic sectarian or cultic

movements might still stir up some strong feelings.4

My explanation for religion’s continuing capacity to excite con-

troversy is not confined to arguments about exotic movements on

the fringe of mainstream religions in the U.K ., however. Instead, I

shall point to a number of other factors which combine to increase,

rather than decrease, the likelihood that religion will continue to be

a site of controversies for the foreseeable future. I shall begin by list-

ing some of the uses to which religion is put which often give rise

to friction and controversy even in socalled secular societies. In the

first place, religion serves as a ‘languag e’ in which m any people who

may no longer be associated with any religious organisations still

choose to express their strongest fears, sorrows, aspirations, joys and

wishes. Secondly, religious symbols are still widely deployed as sym-

bolic marke rs of p ersonal an d collective iden tity , although the att ach -

ment to orthodox creeds and rites may be greatly attenuated. Thirdly,

some religious symbols serve as vehicles of challenging ideas about,for example, the fragility of the natural environment, the sacredness

of human rights and the value o f justice.

What helps to make these persisting uses of religious symbols poten-

tially controversial is that the symbols are no longer the exclusive

pro pe rty of religious organis atio ns or faith com munitie s. As so ma ny

people rema in de tac he d from these collectiv ities the y are no longer

subject to the control that clergy and other religious professionals

would have tried to exercise over the use of these symbols in the

past . Mo reo ver, rising levels of ed ucation al att ain me nt , inc rea sed

rates of social and geographical mobility and growing exposure to

the media of mass communication have further eroded the possibil-ity that religious organisations could control the uses to which their

symbols would be put. I characterised this situation as follows in an

earlier publication:

4 Wilson has consistently argued that cults and sects might continue to thriveamidst general secularisation (Wilson 1976). Others, among whom Max Weber wasthe most notable, have identified the popularity of exotic religious innovations asevidence of secularisation in the sense of declining faith in the ‘old gods’ and theinvention of ‘ersatz deities’ to replace them.



Religion has come adrift from its former points of anchorage but isno less potentially powerful as a result. It remains a potent culturalresource or form which may act as the vehicle of change, challengeor conservation. Consequently, religion has become less predictable . . .And the chances that religion will be controversial are increased bythe fact that it may be used by people having little or no connectionwith formal religious organisations. The deregulation of religion is oneof the hidden ironies of secularisation.5

This situation may represent what Meerten ter Borg calls ‘dein-

stitutionalisation’ of religion,6 but unlike him I detect signs o f ‘re-

institutionalisation’ or at least of struggles to impose new bound aries

around religion. To some extent the growth of religious diversity

in the U.K. has helped to precipitate some of these struggles.

In fact, one of the main reasons for the contentiousness of reli-

gion in the U.K. is that migration of Buddhists, Hindus, Jains,

Muslims and Sikhs from the Caribbean, Hong Kong, South Asia

and East Africa since the early 1950s has sharply increased the degree

of religious diversity in the coun try.7 Many Britishborn members of

these faith communities are now children and young adults who are

living in large and well established settiements, mainly in large cities,which are supported by numerous organisations for religious, cul-

tural, political and social purposes. They are not so much commu-

nities of migrants as integral, but distinctive, parts of British society.

Yet, their presence in the U.K. helps to ensure that the boundary

betwee n religion and nonreligion rem ains conte ntiou s.

For example, English common law makes it an offence (termed

‘blasp hem y’) to ridicule, vilify or insult the tenets o f the C hur ch of

England.8 Since this law does not apply to any other churches or

religions, those Muslims who were aggrieved by the publication in

1988 of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, were unable to

bring a prosecutio n for blas phemy. A cam paign to extend the law

on blasphemy to all religions was launched, with support from the

leading representatives of various faith communities, including many

Christians, but the British Government decided in 1989 that it had

no intention of extending the legislation to cover Islam or any other

26 JAMES A. BECKFORD

5 Beckford 1989: 170172.5 Te r Borg in this volume.

7 The settlement of large numbers of Jews and Roman Catholics in the U.K.from the 1840s onwards had created many heated controversies of a kind whichis now being reproduced in the 1990s.

8 Bradney 1993.


religion. Meanwhile, the controversy sparked off a different kind of

campaign to rescind the law on blasphemy, in effect depriving all

religions of legal protec tion ag ainst ridicule, vilification and insult.

The Rushdie Affair brought to the surface of public life in the U.K.

a series of issues not only about the relatively disprivileged status of

Islam in English (and Scottish) law but also about the alleged bias

of the law towards at least one form of religion. Nonreligious beliefs

received no such legal protection. This was unjust in the eyes ofmany campaigners against the law on blasphemy, although very few

Muslims took this view.

The main question was whether it was justifiable for the law to

pro tec t any form of relig ion in a society cha rac teri sed by low levels

of participation in religious activities and by growing diversity of reli-

gions. It was widely argued that, on grounds of equity, the law should

offer protection to all religions or to none. Partly because of the

difficulty of defining religion for legal purposes and partly because

only two blasphemy cases had come to court in the twentieth cen-

tury, the Law Commission9 had earlier recommended abolition of

the law on blasphemy. Other parties to the debates about blasphemy

wanted to abolish it as an offence because it represented an unwar-

ranted restriction on the freedom of expression. All the varied argu-

ments about extending or abolishing the law on blasphemy touched

indirectly on questions about constituting religion as a single cate-

gory for legal purposes. The fact that prosecutions for blasphemy

have been extremely rare in the twentiethcentury only underlines

the point that the increasing variety of faith communities in the U.K.

after the midcentury was one of the factors which helped to create

the controversy and to make it correspondingly more difficult to

define religion in a noncontroversial fashion. And, according to one

of the commentators on the Rushdie Affair:

The component of culture which tends to be the most problematicis that which has been preeminent in the Rushdie affair—religion.Different religious faiths are necessarily conflicting religious faiths and, because they concern the right and the true, a clash of beliefs offerslittle scope for accommodation or compromise.10

9 Law Commission Working Pap er 1981, no. 79: ‘Offences against religion and

publ ic wo rsh ip’.10 Jon es 1990.




It is interesting that this quotation makes no reference to ethnicity

or ‘race’.

The fact that defining religion for legal purposes has always been

difficult in the U.K. seems strange at first glance. After all, most of

the country’s major social institutions have been directly or indirectly

shaped by Christianity for more than one thousand years. Even the

law11 which first formalised the legal and fiscal advantag es acco rded

to charitable trusts neglected to define religion despite the fact that

‘the advanc ement of religion’ was identified at the end of the nine-

teenthcentury as one of the four ‘objects’ eligible to be ‘charitable

in law’. On further reflection, however, this situation is less strange

than it appears to be. The reason why a definition of religion was

considered unnecessary was that Christianity was the only conceiv-

able instance of the category at that time. Indeed, legal restrictions

against Protestants other than Anglicans, against Roman Catholics

and against Jews did much to ensure tha t the public life of England

was moulded by Anglican values and institutions. This does not nec-

essarily mean, however, that the majority of adults were active par-ticipants in the Church: it merely means that the institutions of, for

example, marriage, education, social welfare, health care, the law,

local government, the monarchy, Parliament and the military reflected

the Anglican ascendancy.

Various tax and financial advantages are accorded by English law

to collectivities which meet the criteria for being deemed ‘charitable

in law’. These charities must be registered with the Charity Commission

and must be administered by trustees in accordance with stringent

regulations. The fundamental assumption underlying the law on char-

ities is that that they must earn their privileges by serving the pub-

lic good. As late as the midtwentieth century it was still virtually

taken for granted that only monotheistic religions could qualify for

charitable status. Today, charitable status is routinely denied to organ-

isations based on nontheistic belief systems such as Scientology, sec-

ularism and paganism. The Charity Commissioners (who administer

the register of charitable organisations) also have the power to refuse

registration to any organisations which clearly qualify as religions but

the purposes of which are not c onsidered to be ‘in the public inter-

est’. In the circumstances, it is hard to disagree with the following

judg em en t of a lead ing jur ist in the field of religio n and the law:

11 Charitable Uses Act 1601.


The need for reform is clear. At present the law is unjust because itdistinguishes between different religious adherents in a manner whichis arbitrary and incapable of rational defence. To clarify the law in amanner which would promote religious freedom would be a difficulttask involving . . . the need to address the question of the definition ofreligion . . . [T]he present law of charity provides yet another illus-tration of the mixture of bias and muddle which characterises British

law’s attitude towards religions.12

My point is that the origins of the ‘bias and m uddle’ can be traced

back to the late med ieva l and early mo de rn tenden cy to equ ate reli-

gion with a particular form of Christianity and that the rapid growth

of nonChristian faith communities and philosophies of life in the

U.K. in the second half of the twentiethcentury has exacerbated the

original confusion. It is notoriously difficult to assess the size of, for

example, the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities, but

they probably constitute about 3 millions of the 58 millions popu-

lation of the U.K.

As in the case of the law of blasphemy, the level of dissatisfac-

tion with the law of charity is reaching a point where many peopleare calling for the removal of ‘the advancement of religion’ from the

list of criteria of charitable status in law. The dissatisfaction is appar-

ent in the following plea from a prominent columnist in one of the

U.K.’s good quality newspapers:

Religion is ineffable, mysterious, an act of faith, a state of grace, alight inaccessibly hidden from our eyes—not, in other words, the sortof thing courts or charity commissioners should be expected to codifyand police. There is only one sane answer—and that is to deregisterthem all. Our secular society, where only 35 per cent of people believein a Supreme Being, should not be spending public funds, in tax for-gone, to f inance any o f these curious beliefs.13

The tone of Toynbee’s article also reflects a feeling of exasperation

with arrangements which tie religion and law closely together. This,

in turn, is probably part of a wider frustration with what I shall call

the ‘juridif ication of everything ’. It suggests that religion does not

deserve the protection of the law if it needs to b e juridified— again,

harking back to an earlier era in which it was unnecessary to define

religion because it was coterminous with Anglican Christianity.

12 Bradney 1993: 131132.13 Polly Toynbee ‘A being that works in mysterious ways’, The Independent, 15 Jul y

1996. Her article’s sarcastic subtitle was ‘Who is to say what is a proper religion?That allseeing judge of transcendental things, the Charity Commission’.




In short, the position of religion in the U.K. is affected by sev-

eral simultaneous developments. Firstly, many of the conventional indi-

cators of secularisation are on the increase, although I also recognise

that ‘believing without belonging’14 may be characterisdc of the c oun-

try as well and that privatised and implicit forms of religion may

still be buoy ant.15 Secondly, the establishment of large communitiesof Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs (alongside smaller communities of

Buddhists and Jains) has challenged the taken for granted view that

it is unnecessary to define religion for legal purposes in such an over-

whelmingly ‘Christian’ society. Thirdly, the combination of secular-

isation and diversification of religion in the U.K. is making questions

about the definition of religion more contentious. The im pact of

these changes is magnified by the rapidity and intensity with which

religious controversies are nowadays portrayed in the mass media.

It would require a separate chapter to do justice to the role of the

mass media in inciting and sustaining religious controversies, but it

seems clear to me that religion is considered newsworthy only when

it is controversial.

I shall now analyse two instances of religious controversy which

have recently occurred in the U.K ., both of which revolve around

‘boundary disputes’ or disagreements about appropriate ways to define

and categorise religion. Both disputes are still alive and have polit-

ical implications. Th e first concern s Religious Educat ion in state16

schools; the second concerns religious advertisements on television.

‘ Religion’ in Religious Education

The main thesis of this Chapter, I repeat, is that secularisation and

other simultaneous changes in religion have paradoxically rendered

religion more, rather than less, controversial in the U.K. In partic

14 Davie 1990, 1994.15 See T er Borg in this volume: ‘A process of deinstitutionalization [of religion]

is taking place. Religion is still present, but in a diffuse way. It has taken on verymuch the characteristics of modern society in that it has become individualized,often thisworldly, very pluralistic and so on’.

16 I refer to ‘council’ schools, i.e., schools which are fully funde d or ‘mainta ine d’ by loca l auth orit ies an d ans wer able to locally ele cted Cou ncil s an d to the nat iona lDep artme nt for Education and Em ployment (DfEE). The title of this Governmentministry has changed several times in the past two decades. It was the Departmentof Education; then the Department for Education and Science; and finally, since

1996, the Department for Education and Employment.

ular, the definition o f religion has becom e a site of political strug-

gles. One of the clearest examples of this ‘politicisation of religion’

has occurred in the previously littleknown and relatively uncon

tentious area of Religious Education (hereafter RE). Ever since the

British state began to take responsibility for providing free and com-

pulsory schooling for all chi ldren in the 1870s the re has been a placefor what used to be called Religious Instruction in the school syl-

labus. The content of the syllabus was decided at the level of local

governmen t so that it could reflect the religious ‘complexion’ of each

area. Schools were also required to begin each day with an ‘act of

collective worship’ which, until the 1970s, was invariably Christian

in character. T he children of Jews, R oman Catholics, Jeho vah ’s

Witnesses and other denominations outside the Christian mainstream

were allowed to be absent from RE classes and collective worship

if their parents made a formal request to that effect. These arrange-

ments were rarely contentious before the 1980s.

The situation changed drastically, however, when the Education

Reform Act of 1988 introduced the new principle that ‘Any agreed

syllabus . . . shall reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great

Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teach-

ing and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great

Britain’. At the same time, the longstanding requirement that each

school day should begin with an act of collective Christian worship

(with alternatives permitted for nonChristians) was also strengthened

and respecified.

The new policy on the teaching of RE had been the goal of

intense lobbying by politicians, educationalists and leading members

of mainstream churches17 who were insistent that secularisation and

religious diversification had to be counteracted by instilling the virtuesallegedly found in a ‘common culture’ deriving from Britain’s Christian

heritage. Prominent among the campaigners were the Christian

Institute18 and the Paren tal Alliance for Choice in Education (PACE).

Both groups have continued to monitor implementation of the 1988

Act and responses to subsequent interpretations of its key concepts

from the Governm ent ministry responsible for education.19 They have

also distributed practical advice to parents on how to complain


17 Jack son 1992.18 Bum & Ha rt 1988.19 In particular, DfE Circular 3/89 and DfES Circular 1/89.




effectively if they suspect that RE and collective worship do not con-

form with the current legislation, especially in respect of giving pri-

ority to Christianity. The advice appears to have been successful in

enabling parents to frame complaints appropriately and to feed their

complaints into the process of lobbying education authorities at all

levels for more exclusively Christian RE syllabuses and more ‘reli-

gious’ collective worship.In view of the British Government’s apparent concern with pre-

serving a ‘common culture’ it is interesting to note that the stated

reason why conservative Christian activists began lobbying for a

greater Christian content of RE and school assemblies was their fear

that multifaith or ‘lifestance’ orientations were underm ining the reli-

gious basis for moral commitments. The implication was that only

the Christian religion could fulfil this function in a predominantly

Christian society and that pupils from nonChristian backgrounds

needed exposure to Christianity in order to imbibe the common cul-

ture of the U.K. The advocates of the new policy on RE were fully

engaged in a political struggle to frame Christianity as the only reli-

gion capable of instilling this comm on culture. Oth er religions should

be inc luded in the RE syllabus, accord ing to the pro mo ter s of a

common culture, but only for comparative purposes. Christianity

should be the privileged source of moral and spiritual values.

The then Minister of State for Education, Kenneth Clark, opted

for a conservative interpretation of the Act when he circulated to

LEAs in 1991 some of the legal advice that he had received about

how a cou rt of law might judge the extent to which any agreed syl-

labuses conform ed with Section 8 (3) of the 1988 ERA .20 Th e advice

was that syllabuses had to have sufficiently detailed contents to demon-

strate conformity with the Act, and this could mean that Government

intended to take a keen interest in precisely how RE was to betaught. The advice also suggested that RE teaching should be extended

to ‘wider areas of morality including the difference between right

and wrong’. Again, the implication is clear that, in the Government’s

view as represented in the 1988 Act, the teaching of religion is not

expected to be independent from the inculcation of moral values

presum ably ens hrined in the ‘British way of life’ or the ‘comm on

culture’.21 Indeed, the 1988 Act required schools to provide guid-

ance on spirituality and morality.

20 Hull 1991.

21 Esther Oxford concluded an article in The Independent (30 January 1994) on


The newfound political sensitivity about RE in schools was again

demonstrated during the parliamentary debates on the 1993 Education

Act, which translated the 1992 White Paper on Choice and Diversity

into practical effect. Attempts were made, for example, to restrict

the coverage of syllabuses to no more than any two religions and

to place indepth study of Christianity at the heart of the subject

beca use ‘it is the ma in histo rical her itag e of this land ’. Baroness Cox ,who championed some of these ideas in the House of Lords debates,

had given an intimation of them in her writings nearly ten years

earlier. The grounds for enforcing more strictly the provisions of the

1944 Education Act regarding collective worship and RE were that

‘othe r ideologies’ were allegedly filling ‘the mo ral vacu um ’ left by

the churches an d that th ere was a danger th at ‘some of these ide-

ologies could prove as inimical to true education and as harmful to

our future as a nation as was the enforced adoption of the National

Socialist ideology in the German schools of the 1930s and early

1940s’.22 It was also argued th at churches should have m ade g reater

efforts to challenge the alleged politicisation of the syllabus and should

have created a better ‘appreciation of the moral arguments for the

open liberal democratic societies of the West’23 and of the fate of

religion in Eastern European state socialist societies. A strong plea

was added for the continued support of independent religious schools.

In the event, the DfE’s 1994 Circular on RE and collective wor-

ship24 seemed to set narrower limits on acceptable forms of RE and

school assemblies than those laid down in the 1993 Education Act.

According to Joh n H ull, ‘The effect is to turn the school into a wor-

shipping community and the assembly into a place of worship. Since

par tic ipa tion (and no t merely presence) is req uired of all pupil s, the

effect is that being registered on the school roll becomes an act of

religious comm itment’.25 The re were also grounds for believing that

new model syllabuses for RE with ‘the Government hails religion as a barrier againstmoral corruption and intolerable anarchy’. Evidence for this opinion may have beendrawn from the assertion of Lord Tebbitt, a prominent m ember of Mrs Thatche r’sgovernments, that the members of a society must have in common Taws, customs,standards, values, language, culture a nd religion’ if instability in society were to beavoided’. Lord Tebbitt made this claim in the course of delivering the first NicholasRidley Memorial Lecture on 22 November 1993.

22 Cox & Mark s 1984: 88.23 Cox & Mark s 1984: 88.24 DfE Circular 1/94 ‘Religious Education and Collective Worship’.25 His interpretation may seem farfetched but it is at least consonant with the

Minister for Education’s personal preferences, as expressed in The Spectator on 2ndOctober 1993: ‘I’d like more people to study science. I’d like more of them to show




the Circu lar’s insistence on the pred ominan ce of the C hristian reli-

gion in schools, since it is central to the U.K.’s national heritage,

would have the effect of persuad ing children from nonC hristian

back ground s that they could no t be pa rt of that her itage exce pt pe r-

haps as colonised minorities. I t was not just that Governm ent pol-

icy seemed to involve greater control over religion in schools but

also that an attempt was being made to draw the symbolic bound-

aries of the nat ion mo re tightly and exclusively. In short, a struggle

was taking place for the use of religion for the purpose of generating

social solidarity based on the Christian roots of a wouldbe commonculture.

No t surpris ingly, some leading representat ives of oth er faith tra -

ditions protested against the apparent policy of requiring all pupils

to assimilate to the British and Christian common culture. Some

Muslim parents rebelled against the new policy for RE and collec-

tive worship by withdrawing their children from these activities. In

other places, Christian parents complained that schools were accord-

ing too much importance to ‘other faiths’. The result is a polarisa-

tion of extreme opinions over the appropriate place and characterof religion in state schools, but the broader dispute is about the

boun dary betw een a do minant relig ion and oth er religions. As in

most boundary disputes, however, the majority of the population

remains indifferent towards, or ignorant of, the issues which seem

to concern only people with extreme views.

Religious Advertising on Television

The second instance of a ‘religious boundary dispute’ in the U.K.

concerns a struggle between the Church of Scientology and its oppo-

nents over the former’s eligibility to advertise its beliefs and activi-ties on British television. The Broadcasting Act 1990 provided religious

organisations with their first opportunity to place advertisements on

terrestrial or satellite channels.26 In keeping with the policy of suc-

cessive Governments and broadcasting authorities on the appropri-

a bit more interest, too, in other ac ademic disciplines widr serious intellectual rigour.I’d also like more of them to believe in God and go to church, for that matter’(Hull 1994: 10).

26 But television stations are free to reject some or all religious advertisements.There is no compulsion to accept advertisements; and religious organisations haveno right to demand that their advertisements should be broadcast.

ate form of religious broadcasts, the 1990 Act and the regulatory

bod y that it cre ate d took a very cautious appro ach to the topic of

religious advertising.

It is the statutory duty of the Independent Television Commission

(ITC) to draw up and enforce a code governing the standards of

advertisements on the country’s two terrestrial commercial television

channels and on all existing satellite and future channels. The code’sgeneral principles require that all television advertisements should be

‘legal, decent, honest and truthful’, but special rules apply to reli-

gious advertisements (as well as to advertisements designed to appeal

to children, financial advertisements, advertisements relating to health

and medicine, and charity advertising). The rules do not define reli-

gion as such but they apply to ‘advertising which is submitted by

or on behalf of any body with objects wholly or mainly of a reli-

gious nature or which is directed towards any religious end’ as well

as to ‘systems of belief or philosophy of life which do not involve

recognition of a deity but which can reasonably be regarded as equiv-

alent or alternative to those which do ’.27 This is a highly inclusive

approach which implies greater concern with the effects of deistic andnondeistic belief systems than with the beliefs themselves. In fact,

one of the rules explicitly forbids advertisers from expounding reli-

gious doctrine and belief or from appearing to involve viewers in

acts of worship or p rayer. Advertisers are also forbidden to appeal

for funds for themselves, claim to represent the only true faith, play

on fears, promote faith healing, offer counselling, direct advertise-

ments specifically at viewers under eighteen years of age, offer gifts

other than publications, and seek to exploit vulnerable categories of

viewers such as the elderly or the bereaved. In fact, the only per-

missible purposes of religious advertising are:

(i) to public ise events(ii) to describe an organisation’s activities and ways of contact-

ing it(iii) to offer publications or videos about the organisation.

There is no doubt that this highly restrictive code is designed to pro-

tect viewers from exploitative or manipulative religious organisations.

How does the advertising code identify exploitative and manipu-

lative organisations? The Guidance Notes which accompany the code

specify that advertisements are not acceptable from bodies ‘whose


27 Indepen dent Television Commission, 1995: 30.




Conclusion

It is virtually taken for granted these days that advanced industrial

societies are pluralistic in the double sense of being (a) diverse in

terms of their religious composition and (b) tolerant of this diversity.

I have tried to show that the appearan ce of pluralism may be more

superficial than substantial in some respects. There has certainly beenan increase in religious diversity in the U.K., but the tendency has

also been for the boundaries of acceptable expressions of religion to

be draw n more an d more restrictively. As com pet itio n an d mobility

of members increases between religious collectivities, administrative

and legal measures have been taken to establish progressively nar-

rower notions of acceptable religion, that is, the forms of religion

accepted by official authorities as eligible to benefit from tax con-

cessions, a privileged position in the school curriculum and access

to television advertising.

The concern of officials is usually with criteria of religious authen-

ticity. They tend to ask the question, ‘What is really religious?’. They

tend to respond with criteria which identify ‘real’ religion in terms

of forms of organisation, collective practices and individual obliga-

tions which are entirely voluntary, subject to public scrutiny and

unlikely to generate public controversy. It is common for public offi-

cials to deny that they have any concern with religious beliefs as such.

This means that religion is implicitly defined by them in terms which

favour established, mai nstre am religious institutions.28

By contrast, it is still fashionable for social scientific students of

religion to define religion broadly as a matter of beliefs and attitudes

which, for example, evoke ‘the felt whole’ or which relate human

beings ‘to the ultima te cond ition s of their exis tence’.29 Altern atively,

Ha neg raaff (this volume), extrapolating from Geertz ’s (1966) wellknown formulation, defines religion as ‘any symbolic system which

influences human action by providing possibilities for ritually main-

taining contact between the everyday world and a more general

“metaempirical” framework of meaning’. Byrne’s ‘moral definition’

(this volume) has the advantage of associating symbols with ‘appro-

pri ate act ions’, bu t his exp lica tion of the defin ition still gives more

weight to cognitions and perceptions than to anything else. Similarly,

28 Wilson 1990: 86.29 Bellah 1970.


HervieuLeger’s attempt (this volume) to transcend both functionalist

and substantive definitions of religion by focusing on the transforma-

tions of religious traditions offers and interesting way of understand-

ing the mutations of religion in modernity, but it still gives pride of

pla ce to ‘be lie f’—al beit con stru ed in non ind ivid ual ist terms.

The public imposition of narrow er limits of ‘acceptable’ forms of

religion has been contested, however, by a wide variety of interestgroups, thereby ensuring that the field of religion remains contro-

versial in spite of growing indifference towards most religious organ-

isations. The progressive erosion of the U.K.’s mainstream Christian

monopoly throws the persisting expressions of ‘serious’ religion into

even sharper relief. Consequently, disputes about the definition of

religion for practical purposes remain heated in a socalled secular

society. From a stricdy sociological point of view there is less rea-

son to look for a ‘regula tive’ definition30 whic h migh t solve these dis-

pute s than to stud y the ways in which they deve lop in rela tion to

other social and cultural changes.

References

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Tavistock.Beckford, J.A ., 1989, Religion and Advanced Industri al Society. London: Routledge.

Bellah, R.N., 1970, Beyond Belief. New York: Harper & Row.Borg, M. te r, ‘Wh at is religion?’, in this volume.Bruce, S., (ed.) 1992, Religion and Modernization . Oxford: Clarendon Press.Bradney, A., 1993, Religion, Rights and the La w. Leicester: Leicester University Press.Burn, J., & C. H art 1988, The Clisis in Religious Education. London: Educational

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beckford - politics of defining religion in secular society

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