This dissertation considers the place of religious argument in the public sphere. While deliberation about religion’s place in the formal public sphere within the United States has often been seen as taking place in a two-dimensional space, with Christian nationalism and pure secularism representing the opposite deliberative positions, I argue that in reality, rhetorical engagements over the place of religion often are contested by arguments hewing to Christian Nationalism on one side, but a kind of civic religious pluralism on the other. This dissertation explores the tensions that exist within public discourse in the United States between Christian nationalism and larger secular society. Rather than seeing secularism as a counterweight to Christian nationalism, I argue that instead a civic religious pluralism that allows for religious thought to enter the domain of public deliberation is present in arguments about religion’s role in the democratic process. I also argue that this problem is extended into the three-dimensional space through an added tension between religious citizens who wish to remain isolated from secular culture and the state which must maintain some sense of cultural participation among all of its citizens. Through rhetorical analyses of three cases, I develop a more nuanced perspective on this deliberative space and contend at the end that the civic religious pluralism I find in two of my cases represents a more effective response to nationalist rhetoric than a pure secularist opposition.

Since the ruling pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP hereafter) came to power in 2002, there has been a general transformation in Turkish politics from a secularist orientation toward a mainstream Muslim conservative line. This conservative political transformation manifests itself in the socio-cultural domain in terms of a proliferation of discourses on "family crisis" and the "decline of family values" as well as social programs and projects aimed at "strengthening the Turkish family." While the family crisis discourse situates the family as the source of socio-economic and demographic problems facing the Turkish society, strengthening the family is offered as the primary solution to these problems since the family is conceptualized as the foundation of a firm and stable social order. The Turkish state's intervention into the family sphere has occupied a central place in the governmental and legislative policies of the state since the rise of modern forms of governance in the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. What is novel about the configuration of family governance under the AKP government, however, is the extension of family governance beyond the formal institutions of the state to a wide array of actors, institutions, mechanisms, and rationalities and the deployment of religious or religiously-inspired actors, institutions and organizations in the conceptualization, production, and implementation of social programs and projects aimed at "strengthening the Turkish family." Within the past decade, this concern for maintaining family values and fortifying the family institution has been widely circulated among Muslim conservative circles, and the family has constituted the foundation of most social projects designed and implemented by not only formal political institutions such as the Ministry of the Family and Social Policies and AKP-governed municipalities but also various religious or religiously-inspired organizations and institutions such as the Presidency of Religious Affairs, Islamic civil society organizations, and Islamic television channels. This dissertation focuses on the role of these religious or religiously-inspired actors, institutions, and organizations in shaping the politics of the family in contemporary Turkey. It argues that the increasing prominence given to the family by the state and these religiously-inspired institutions and organizations points to emerging forms of governance as well as reconfigurations of religion and secularism in contemporary Turkey. It also demonstrates how the dominant political discourse on declining family values and the social projects that aim at recuperating these values situate the family as an object of governmental intervention as well as a site of discursive proliferation, disciplinary practices, and biopolitical governance.

<p>While the field of religious studies increasingly turns toward material culture as a counterbalance to understandings of religion that privilege questions of individual belief, theology, and text, influential histories of atheism in the West remain largely confined to the mode of intellectual history. This is understandable when atheism is commonly understood first-and-foremost as an idea about the nonexistence of God. But like religion, atheism is not a purely intellectual position; it is rooted in interpersonal emotional exchanges, material objects and media, and historically-contextual social communities. This dissertation uses tools from the materialist turns in both religious studies and media studies to explore the history of American atheism and its reliance on non-intellectual and non-rational forces. Drawing on theories of affect, visual culture, and aesthetics, it argues that atheism in America has always been more than an idea. In particular, it uses different media forms as lenses to examine the material bases of evolving forms of American disbelief from the 19th century to today. Using archival records of nineteenth-century print media and political cartoons, transcripts and audio-recordings of radio broadcasts during the mid-twentieth-century, and digital ethnography and discourse analysis on contemporary Internet platforms, this dissertation argues that American irreligion has often eschewed the rational in favor of emotional and material strategies for defining a collective identity. Each chapter highlights different metaphors that have been enabled by print, broadcast, and digital media – metaphors that American unbelievers have used to complicate the understanding of atheism as simply a set of beliefs about the nature of reality.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis advisor: Arthur Madigan / This dissertation is based on the claim that Taylor, in his immense philosophical writings, looks for the unifying forces, principles, and those desires in the human agent that can transform modern partial comprehension of reality into a new collage, i.e. a deeper and more meaningful picture of who we are and what is most essential for us. I argue that Taylor in his reflection on modernity adopts Hegel's concern for how to unite two ideals - radical freedom and expressive fullness. In search for an answer to Hegel's concern, Taylor repeatedly comes to the same conclusion. Adequate understanding of modernity, moral sources of modern identity, human agency, and human language, requires insertion in its context; therefore, the description of time, space, and other factors that condition modernity, is crucial. There are some aspects in Taylor's reflection on modernity that either preclude or impede the modern agent's search for fulfillment and freedom (i.e., reduction of the human sciences to the principles of the natural sciences), or open neglected or undiscovered perspectives for investigation, and offer new answers (i.e., challenge of achieving peaceful coexistence in a multicultural society). Underneath these aspects of modernity, Taylor perceives human desire to be free, authentic, and fulfilled. In the recent publications, Taylor brings into focus the closed horizons of modernity in the field of religion, especially the mainstream secularization theory. As long as modernity considers religion and spirituality as unimportant and pushes them aside from our daily life, it effectively closes off some possible answers regarding agent's fulfilment, flourishing, and freedom. It does not mean that every form of religious practice and belief brings us automatically to the goal; some might be narrow and exclusive as well, and therefore have to be examined in turn. Taylor's reflection unfolds the answer to Hegel's concern only gradually. In order to be free, fulfilled, and have a meaningful life, no dimension of human existence can be excluded, all dimensions remain to be examined. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

The current study sought set to replicate and extend previous findings regarding Norris and Inglehart’s (2004) “Secure Society Theory” (SST) of religiosity, which states that religiosity varies as a function of the extent to which one feels secure in their environment. However, the relationship between individual perceptions of societal security—as opposed to national indicators—and religiosity has yet to be tested. The current study addressed this by analyzing data from the General Social Survey, supplemented by FBI and U.S. Census data. Results indicated that the extent to which one feels safe walking around their neighborhood at night is a significant predictor of religiosity, even when crime rate, poverty rate, age, sex, and race are also considered. Additionally, time series analyses of data from 1980 to 2012 with a lag of 10 years provided partial support for SST, with neighborhood fear and poverty significantly predicting future religiosity. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis presents a specific case study of the developing relationship between religious pluralism and national identity in Scotland by focusing on a particular high-profile group - Interfaith Scotland (IFS) - the country's national interfaith body, which has received little scholarly attention. This thesis argues that IFS represents religious pluralism as interrelated with contemporary Scottish national identity through its organisation and its literature: representing Scotland as one nation of many faiths. This discourse of unity in diversity presents a structured and limited religious pluralism based on the world religions paradigm (WRP), and is compatible with a civic-cultural form of nationalism. The WRP involves a model of religion which focuses on broad global traditions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, over specific local communities and distinct denominations. These global traditions are defined by coherent, intellectual and ethical dimensions represented as closely equivalent. This paradigm is evident from the governing structures within IFS itself which represents individual religious bodies according to the world tradition into which they can be classified and affords a secondary, non-governing status to those who are not recognised as part of one of these traditions. Their world religions approach is also evident from representations of 'religions' in their literature, which emphasise broader intellectual and ethical traditions even in relation to communities outside the major traditions they recognise and the 'Non-religious' Humanist movement. This demonstrates their reliance on these categories in depicting Scotland and its population. The chapters of this thesis will explore how IFS depicts the Scottish nation and its population through the category of 'religion': the Christian majority, religious minority groups and the Non-religious. It also examines how IFS draws on civic and cultural resources to construct a common Scottish national identity compatible with their structured and limited pluralism. This civic-cultural nationalism is often banal or implicit, reinforcing the conception of interfaith relations taking place within a Scottish national framework through innocuous references to Scotland as a bounded society and the use of common cultural symbols of Scottishness to represent the 'unity' encasing that religious diversity. This can be classified as a form of nationalism because it represents the overarching secular national political framework of Scotland as supremely authoritative, as the legitimate basis for the political representation of the population rather than any specific religious identities. IFS' nationalism was especially evident during the lead up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence during which they consistently affirmed the right of the Scottish population to national self-determination without endorsing either position. The key themes of IFS' expressions of nationalism and the world religions paradigm are related. The conception of religions as of global importance as intellectual and ethical traditions rather than specific political movements at the local level means that religious identifications do not conflict with the territorially limited authority of the nation. Through these discourses 'religious' and 'national' identities are represented as compatible and non-competitive. This thesis relates to the wider comparative study of the changing relationship between religion, secularism and nationalism in the contemporary world. It makes a contribution to the critical social scientific study of interfaith groups and the role they play in governance, processes of national integration, the reinforcement of national identity in civil society, and the construction of religious identities. It provides evidence that the relationship between nationalism and religion is not always either wholly separated or related to religious exclusivism as with certain forms of religious-nationalism, but that religious pluralism can also be related to forms of nationalism despite assumptions of their incompatibility.

My dissertation, "A Proper Secularism: Beyond Ideology in Bulgakov, Trilling, Updike and Pynchon," explores the ways in which the literary imagination pushes beyond ideology, and points towards notions of the eternal, by attunement and fidelity to the material. In the terms of Rowan Williams, "if a proper secularism requires faith; if it is to guarantee freedom, this is because a civilized politics must be a politics attuned to the real capacities and dignities of the person." It is the argument of this thesis that the literary imagination, when operating with integrity, mirrors this understanding of the properly secular. A proper secularism is thus defined as both an insistence upon accurate portrayal of the material world in all its variety and difference and, concomitantly, as an honest "holding together" of that difference that can provide an approach to the eternal. It is my contention that four novels, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov; The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling; Roger's Version by John Updike; and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, each embody and rely upon this understanding of the secular. In so doing, each book pushes beyond the ideology of a century of war and violent imposition. Bulgakov's novel was composed in the heart of Communist Russia; Trilling's novel deals with the lives and ideological biases of Communist sympathizers in America; Pynchon writes from America but about London as it copes with the unitary, impositional ideology of death as signified by the German V-2 rocket in World War II; John Updike, though not overtly concerned with the Cold War in Roger's Version, nonetheless explores the machinery of war in the computer and its language. It is the argument of this dissertation that these novels constitute an answer to the violence of impositional ideology, a counter-arc to the path of the rocket, gravity's impositional rainbow.

A comparative study of the development of places of worship in Sydney was conducted primarily through the collection of data from development applications to construct or to use premises as a place of worship over a five year period from 2000-2005. The data indicated that a greater and disproportionately higher number of applications by religious minorities were rejected. The significance of the findings does not lie exclusively in identifying the likelihood of development applications gaining approval. The process of determining development applications and the impacts of the outcome of the process were also important. This is why the content of the objections raised to development applications was analysed. The underlying themes in the opposition to development applications related strongly to citizenship, particularly how the boundaries of local forms of citizenship are negotiated. In establishing places of worship religious groups seek to have their citizenship claims recognised. These citizenship claims include: the right to access, mark and use space (Dunn 2005), equality of citizenship with local residents and with other religious groups, and importantly, the right to freedom of worship. One of the main assertions made in this thesis is that by restricting access to sites that people can worship and by restricting the practice of religion, the right to freedom of worship is compromised. Churches dominate the religious landscape of Sydney. This dominance can be partially attributed to the significant levels of historical assistance from the state with the building of Churches. This included access to land, free labour, support for clergy and income support which assisted in the development of early Churches. The appropriateness of giving this type of assistance is not debated in this thesis. However, the assistance itself is significant for two main reasons. Firstly it is emblematic of the privileged relationship between the Church and the state in Australia, and secondly, it raises questions over the lack of privileges afforded to religious minorities. In responding to the question of whether secularism is likely to assist religious minorities, the establishment of places of worship demonstrates how pluralising the Church state link may be of greater utility to religious minorities than strict forms of secularism. The examination of this issue introduces the importance of an equal relationship between the state and religious groups to equality of citizenship for religious minorities. The extent to which multicultural citizenship can assist religious minorities in realising their right to freedom of worship was critically examined in this thesis. The adequacy of the institutional responses to religious diversity was assessed. This included an examination of local government, courts, the media, heritage programs and the planning profession. The planning process demonstrates how a supposedly neutral or colour-blind approach can generate uneven outcomes, which discriminate against religious minorities. The broader policy and legislative responses to religious diversity were examined in order to identify how deficiencies in the multicultural framework contributed to difficulties for religious minorities establishing places of worship.

This report is an attempt to clarify how religious and non-religious views-of-life [livsåskådningar] are created through the collaboration and opposition of religious and scientific elements/ideas. This with the hope of reaching a fruitful result related to the solution of world-view related conflicts, such as the ones existing between science and religion, on an individual and societal level. This is accomplished with the help of two assertions: (1) Mankind has a need to explain its existence and surroundings. (2) Religion and science has their origins in the same seed and aim to serve the same purpose, or function. Together these two assertions lay the theoretical foundations of this report which implies that all humans have an innate need of sustaining a stable world-view. The result of this report is that a final solution to world-view related conflicts are beyond reach as our mental and physical nature limits us. However there are strategies for minimizing world-view related conflicts effect on society.

This dissertation examines the interplay of queer sexuality, theology, and transatlantic modernism in the oeuvres and critical receptions of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Hart Crane (1899-1932), and W.H. Auden (1907-1973). As an interdisciplinary study in literary criticism and of each author’s reception history, this thesis reads the poetry, critical prose, and correspondence of Eliot, Crane, and Auden with focused reference to queer theory and continental philosophies of religion extending from Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in the post-Kantian legacy. Gauging the “post-secular turn” in cultural criticism, the dissertation develops a critique of “epistemic secularism,” which constitutes a normative framework for scholarship in many branches of the humanities. To examine “the secular limits of discipline” at the junction of queer theory and modernist studies, it examines how literary critics and queer theorists define modernity and conceptualize subjectivity at the secular limits (or limitations) of their fields. Imbrications of theology and queerness in the works of Eliot, Crane, and Auden occasion this study’s response to epistemic secularism and prompt its recalibration of secularism in the ethical terms of “mere reason,” rather than as an episteme rife with antireligious politics. Research undertaken for this thesis is guided by two foundational questions: 1) Do extant models for the study of queer sexualities presuppose secularism or enforce secularization as a benchmark for the “achievement of modernity”? 2) Are religious foundations conceivable for queer subjects to whom secularism remains a key factor in the emancipatory history of sexual cultures? The dissertation argues that, for better and for worse, secularism has become a blueprint in the metropolitan West for thinking sexual modernity as progressive and achievable. Notwithstanding such provisos, this study finds that the “proper” subject in queer-modernist studies is in essence neither nonreligious nor antireligious. Rather, reading with and against the grain of secularism’s episteme, it uncovers in the corpuses of Eliot, Crane, and Auden a radical conception of theology as a positively queer endeavour in an era of “liberated” secularist polities. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2014-02-28 10:37:43.026