Rethinking secularity within urban planning

how to rethink the relationship between religious convictions and planning actions

Urban planners – whose disciplinary focus is the local, the spatial, and the practical – have been largely indifferent to the significance of religious deference in urban settings and seemingly unable to understand why religious diversity presents both problems and opportunities for the modern city. This Interface examines challenges that urban planners face in managing the complex and morally heterogenous cities of our contemporary secular age – an age in which urban environments are increasingly interconnected economically and yet fractured by religious contestation. We live at a particular socio-historical juncture when conventional notions of the public sphere face constant pressures, not only from the growing public influence of religion, but also from the secular anxieties that emergent religious claims generate. These interdependent forces have cast aside the facile prophecies of secularization theories – supposing that as modernity waxes, religion, in its public manifestation, wanes. Renewed religious and spiritual commitments to tackle social injustices of urban problems have also questioned old conceits that religion must be irrelevant in conventional planning deliberations.

The emergence of the self-conscious individual does not eliminate religion but displaces religious norms as social foundations for the self. Human nourishing becomes the responsibility of each person in a civil society. This practical idea of ‘the individual’ grew over centuries in the West to produce disparate accommodations with religious doctrines and practice. ‘Secularity’ implies that people recognize as normal and unexceptional, a plurality of religious affiliations and doctrines that compete for devotees and converts. But religious convictions can range across a spectrum from warm embrace to full rejection of an exclusive humanism. First, those whose religious ties constitute linguistically and culturally their own senses of self, tend to ignore or reject the legitimacy of a secular/religious divide.

The monotheists believe in the ultimate foundational reality of a personal or impersonal divinity. Polytheists believe in the animating spiritual force of many local gods. These theistic believers can recognize the salience and power of modern innovations tied to scientific discovery, and still insist upon the foundational relevance and validity of religious doctrines and customs as cognitive filters and moral guides. Second, for others, God has become a spiritual force, infusing and animating the energy and matter of the universe. Rational scientific knowledge for these believers has validity and reach without grasping the "laments of spiritual forces at play. Third, for still others, religious ties persist mostly as embedded cultural precedents, largely stripped of their animating power, like metaphors used so often that they become literal.

These believers may conduct religious rituals, celebrate religious holidays, participate in worship services with others and even adopt devotional practices. But they do so to create social rather than sacred meanings. Finally, we find those indifferent to all forms of religious belief and activity, but who recognize the power and influence of religion in the lives of others. These exclusive humanists believe that we humans invented the divine as a social product of an evolving conscious understanding of ourselves and the world. Among these are atheists who insist that people cannot and should not persist in an attachment to a divine spirit because this distracts them from understanding their responsibility to the world and each other.

Secularism is an ideologically-freighted myth, seemingly a practical necessity for complex modern life but actually a means of advancing the interests of the powers that be along lines of gender, race, empire, and especially religion, and the story of the secular city, the religious provinces, and the spiritual wilds no longer holds sway If secularism is an illusion perpetuated by the powers that be to advance the interests of the few, then calling out and then countering or interrupting secularism may be an obligation of justice. This is the implicit premise of much recent scholarship, in the tradition of critical theory, exploring the links of secularism to projects of imperial, gender, racial, economic, and other forms of domination.

religious diversity in cities has provided an occasion for multiple tensions to play out: from nineteenth-century church bell controversies with wealthy, native-born congregations objecting to loud, frequent bells that would attract poor, immigrant congregants to the neighborhood to twenty-first century debates over calls for prayer coming from mosques with Islamophobia and racism nearly indistinguishable, fueled by the resentment accompanying economic decline. From a different direction, other critics of secularism focus on the norm-laden religious traditions that secularism masks or mutes. While seemingly neutral, secularism is actually a bad form of Christianity, with its own confused commitments to transcendence, incarnation, and salvation (Milbank, 1990). Or secularism takes away the ability of any participant in a religious tradition to speak fully about what they believe to be good, true, and beautiful.