View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Singapore Management University Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Research Collection School of Social Sciences School of Social Sciences 2-2013 Grounded theologies: ‘Religion’ and the ‘secular’ in human geography Justin Kh TSE Singapore Management University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research Part of the Geography Commons, and the Religion Commons Citation TSE, Justin Kh.(2013). Grounded theologies: ‘Religion’ and the ‘secular’ in human geography. Progress in Human Geography, 38(2), 201-220. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3134 This Journal Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Social Sciences at Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Research Collection School of Social Sciences by an authorized administrator of Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. For more information, please email [email protected]. Article Progress in Human Geography 2014, Vol. 38(2) 201–220 ª The Author(s) 2013 Grounded theologies: Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav ‘Religion’ and the ‘secular’ DOI: 10.1177/0309132512475105 in human geography phg.sagepub.com Justin K.H. Tse The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Abstract This paper replies to Kong’s (2010) lament that geographers of religion have not sufficiently intervened in religious studies. It advocates ‘grounded theologies’ as a rubric by which to investigate contemporary geographies of religion in a secular age. Arguing that secularization can itself be conceived as a theological process, the paper critiques a religious/secular dichotomy and argues that individualized spiritualities presently prevalent are indicative of Taylor’s (2007) nova effect of proliferating grounded theologies. Case studies are drawn from social and cultural geographies of religious intersectionalities and from critical geopolitics. Keywords cultural geography, geopolitics, intersectionality, postcolonial, religion, secular, theology I Introduction: ‘religion,’ ‘the religious scholarship in other disciplines. (Kong secular’, and geographies of 2010: 769–770) grounded theologies Similarly, Yorgason and della Dora (2009) In the past decade, there have been more than 10 argue that religion is the last terra incognita in special issues and numerous single articles on geography because it is often assessed for its geographies of religion in various human geo- relevance to secular spatial theories instead of graphy journals. However, Kong (2010) notes being studied in its own right. The problem, it that geographers of religion are still relatively would seem, is that religion remains an unde- unknown in the interdisciplinary enterprise of fined ‘black box’ in human geography, under- religious studies: mining the imperative to rectify the error that while ‘race, class and gender are invariably What remains is for greater effort to be put into invoked and studied as ways by which societies clarifying what religion is and is not. Thus far, are fractured, religion is forgotten or conflated geographers have tended to treat religion ‘as an with race’ (Kong, 2001: 212). After all, if ‘the object of empirical study’ ... rather than to religious and the spiritual were and are central engage more deeply with the theological and philosophical underpinnings of belief. This means not taking for granted the meaning of Corresponding author: religion and the sacred, but studying the com- University of British Columbia 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, plexity of religion itself ... [for] geographical BC V6Y1Z2, Canada. insights have not yet significantly influenced Email: [email protected] 202 Progress in Human Geography 38(2) to the everyday lives of vast numbers of individ- either ‘religious’ or ‘secular’. By religion,I uals’ (Holloway and Valins, 2002: 5–6; see also mean the practice of particular narratives Ammerman, 2007; Falah and Nagel, 2005; Orsi, regarding divine action, transcendent presence, 1999), to leave religion as the great geographi- or supernatural reality in the immanent world cal unknown would ignore how it ‘rather that in turn inform conceptions of place- ‘‘speaks back’’ through its own specificities – making. By the secular, I refer in particular to constraining, redirecting, interacting with, and the grounded theologies that focus on this- often problematizing the human geographer’s worldly concerns, whether by attempting to colonizing narrative’ (Yorgason and della Dora, create consensus among different positions 2009: 631). through dialogue, by privatizing transcendent While I agree that religion should be concep- experiences as irrelevant to the immanent, or tualized as a category of geographical analysis, I by imposing a political regime to eradicate ‘reli- suggest that it is not necessary to define the reli- gion’ altogether. In short, I will demonstrate that gious in geography, as if there were anything geographies of the ‘secular’ fall under the rubric that could be considered outside the bounds of of grounded theologies. This view is based on religious inquiry. Still, some working defini- my geographical reading of discussions in the tions are in order. My central argument is that interdisciplinary enterprise of religious studies the task of geographers who deal with religion which hold that, despite attempts to construct is to reveal spaces, places, and networks as con- the present as a secular age, the modern world stituted by grounded theologies, performative remains theologically constituted, albeit practices of place-making informed by under- through a proliferation of new religious subjec- standings of the transcendent. They remain tivities, including atheistic ones (Asad, 2003; theologies because they involve some view of Milbank, 2006; Taylor, 2007). Such a view, I the transcendent, including some that take a suggest, is also a critical return to Eliade’s negative view toward its very existence or rele- (1959) understanding of humanity as homo reli- vance to spatial practices; they are grounded giosus whose bent toward the transcendent has insofar as they inform immanent processes of not been fully superseded by secular foci on the cultural place-making, the negotiation of social immanent. Indeed, in what follows, I shall identities, and the formations of political demonstrate that a view of secularization as a boundaries, including in geographies where theological process itself has particular rele- theological analyses do not seem relevant. By vance for geographers, whether or not their grounding transcendent theologies in immanent work deals with ‘religion’ as conventionally geographies, I take my cue from Taylor’s (2007: conceived. 16) reference to a secular age tending to deny ‘any form of interpenetration between the things II From secularization to secular of Nature, on the one hand, and the ‘‘superna- tural’’ on the other, be this understood in terms theologies: appropriating radical of the one transcendent God, or of Gods or orthodoxy spirits, or magic forces, or whatever’, and yet Despite my interest in grounded theologies, my being unable to escape the ‘schizophrenic, or assessment of the secularization thesis is conso- better, deeply cross-pressured’ feeling of ‘the nant with Wilford’s (2010) complaint about sense that there is something more’ than the overly facile understandings of secularity in immanent (Taylor, 2007: 727). geographies of religion. An influential premise Indeed, grounded theologies can describe within geography holds that the sighting of the processes that have conventionally been labeled religious in modern contexts either disproves Tse 203 the secularization thesis (Holloway and Valins, religion. My aim has been to problematize the 2002; Proctor, 2006) or has ushered in an age of idea of an anthropological definition of religion postsecularity (Beaumont and Baker, 2011). by assigning that endeavor to a particular history However, Wilford conceives of secularization of knowledge and power ... out of which the as a social process of differentiation, fragment- modern world has been constructed. (Asad, ing the modern world by transferring sover- 1993: 54) eignty once held by sacred authorities over the Echoing Asad, my discussion of theology ostensibly non-religious to the secular state (see should not be read as arbitrarily limiting the Casanova, 1994). The result has been an field of religious discussion to the tradition that increasing individualization and privatization I prefer, or, worse yet, as an agenda to prosely- of social life worlds, including religious ones tize geographers to subscribe to my theological (Bruce, 2001; Lilla, 2008). That even practitio- views. Instead, my aim is to show that the ners can consider religion private demonstrates claims of the secularization thesis depend on a that their religious practice has been infused by subversion of Christian theology. secular ideologies. The issue is ‘not whether An influential school of thought within Chris- secular differentiation has occurred, but tian theology holds that secularization is theologi- rather what are its ultimate effects?’ (Wilford, cal because, as Schmitt (2005) once put it, ‘All 2010: 335). significant concepts of the modern theory of the However, the very secularization