---
title: "Activism &#038; Belief w/ Rosemary Hancock"
date: "2021-03-16T09:26:25+00:00"
modified: "2021-03-16T09:26:25+00:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/articles/activism-belief-w-rosemary-hancock/"
post_id: 7142
---

# Activism & Belief w/ Rosemary Hancock

What’s the relationship between people’s faith and their activism? What extra dimension does religion bring to social movements and to cities? How might being a person of faith shape one’s attitude to environmentalism and to life beyond the self? In this eighth episode of our podcast “[With Reason](https://podfollow.com/1540797061)“, Alice Bloch talks to Rosie Hancock about the intersection of religious belief and political action.

*Hosts: Alice Bloch and Samira Shackle*

*Producer: Alice Bloch*

*Music: Danosongs*

**Podcast listeners can get a year’s subscription to New Humanist magazine for just £13.50. Head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the code WITHREASON**

Transcript:
-----------

**Alice Bloch:**

Hello and welcome to “With Reason” from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association with me, Alice Bloch –

**Samira Shackle:**

– and me Samira Shackle.

**AB:**

This is the podcast where we meet writers and academics both long established and more new to bring you thinking from people whose work should be talked about, but no doubt disagreed with a bit sometimes too. It’s a place for bright ideas to illuminate our ever turbulent times, space to think about reason and unreason, belief and disbelief, criticism and debate, and perhaps even a space in which to change your mind.

**SS:**

Last week, we heard from Katherine Angel, whose latest book challenges the dogma on female desire and dares to explore the assumptions wrapped up in ideas around consent. And in this series, we’ll be examining mainstream ideas around other subjects – things like citizenship, identity, mental health, and more. But today, we’re listening to an interview that you recorded Alice with the sociologist Rosie Hancock. I’ll be back at the end of the show to chat with you a bit more. But for now, could you tell us a bit more about Rosie?

**AB:**

Yes. So Rosie is interested in religion, politics and activism and how those things overlap and interact with each other. Her work leads us to some really massive questions, kind of conceptual questions, things like: Where does politics and and faith begin, for example (indeed, what even is politics?) but it also raises some practical ones too. So things like how does religion show itself in the city? Or why do secular activists tend to meet in religious spaces like, you know, kind of old church crypts. She is based in Sydney, where she’s written about things like community organizing and religion.

And she has also written a book about what she calls Islamic environmentalism in the UK and in the US. So there’s absolutely loads to talk about. When we met, online of course, I started by asking Rosie what drew her to her research: was there, perhaps, a personal story behind the work?

**Rosie Hancock:**

So I am the daughter of an Anglican priest, I grew up in New Zealand. So I grew up literally at the church, we lived behind the church, the church was kind of a playground for me as a child. And there’s this strong line of Christian socialism in my family, which really influenced my father, I think. And so the type of Christianity that I grew up with, which I don’t think I realized was perhaps a little unusual until much later in life, was this idea that Jesus was the leader of a reformed cult, he was fighting injustice and oppression that he saw in the world around him. And, in fact, a lot of that was directed at religious hierarchies at that time. So that was kind of the background in which I grew up, but I’ve had a really complex relationship to the church in my adult life. So I have ended up studying people who have very similar types of attitudes towards politics, I think that my father has and that my parents have. So in a way, I think looking on it now, I would say perhaps it’s a kind of complicated form of therapy, perhaps.

**AB:**

But I think academic research is for a lot of people, isn’t it?

**RH:**

Yeah, exactly. I’m really interested in people from religious communities who go out into the world, get involved in progress, what you might call progressive politics, environmentalism, social justice issues, and try and sort of live out their faith through action in a way.

**AB:**

So what reaction do people have to your academic interest in religion? So I know when I was at university, I kind of often wrongly assumed that people who studied religion were surely religious themselves, and only came to kind of later realize actually how fascinating theology could be as a discipline. I mean, I know you didn’t study theology, per se, but you study religion. My experience here in the UK, is that theology is taught very, very separately from politics, philosophy, sociology, and so on. People like me, maybe just because I was very narrow-minded, kind of see it rather as a distinct thing, and maybe even rather sort of suspiciously. Is this the same in Australia? This divide?

**RH:**

Yeah, I mean, interestingly, there’s been a really long history in which theology has not been taught at a lot of secular Australian universities. It is definitely seen as something that’s very confessional or apologetic and something that you maybe wouldn’t study unless you were really religious, certainly the theology side of things. And people who think people who study religion for a long time had a bit of a different identity, perhaps saw themselves as objective outside observers. And what’s really interesting, I think that there’s been a shift in the last, say, 10 years, in that we’re more open to theology, that people who are not religious might want to study theology, or that theologians have interesting things to say about the world that are relevant to people beyond their own religious communities. But also that scholars of religion maybe aren’t as objective as we might want to think we are all the time.

**AB:**

So your work is about this relationship between religion and politics. And so I guess before we carry on, it’s worth picking out a few definitions. And some might say that this distinction between religion and politics is really about the distinction between the irrational and the rational realms. I wonder what your response is to that. And on top of that, how you’re actually defining politics in your work in particular.

**RH:**

Yeah, I don’t want to go on like a giant lecture. It’s a really interesting question, or an interesting topic, that religion is irrational and politics is rational, because I think there’s been a whole heap of work in religious studies and things done in the last sort of 20ish years that show how we constructed the idea of what religion is, in a kind of binary opposition to the secular. And politics very much sits in the secular and it’s meant to be rational, it’s meant to be, you know, all these things. And religion is constructed as diametrically opposed to that. But the important thing about all of that is: that is a construction and narrative that we developed about religion and about politics. And it’s not necessarily reflective of the world as it actually is, but is reflective of the world as certain people like to say it is. And so a lot of my work actually really questions the idea that the religious and political can be separated or can be easily distinguished from one another, or that politics is necessarily the rational domain, where you might solve conflict, for example, or that kind of thing.

**AB:**

I guess anyone also observing politics in the last few years, or really ever in depth, will tell you it’s not always rational. Exactly. But by politics in your work, you’re really talking about engagement in mainstream democracy and political process as well – kind of deliberation, nonviolent activism? You’re not talking about terrorism. And you’re also not talking about party politics. Am I right?

**RH:**

That’s correct. Yeah, I’m really interested in people who go out and get involved in their community, get involved in social movements, what you might call grassroots politics, I guess.

**AB:**

So I guess we’ll go on in a minute to talk about the sorts of grassroots groups that you study. But in the average kind of public imagination, I suppose there are certain stereotypes that persist about faith and activism, like one of these is this idea, maybe held by the secular left in particular, or the so-called “progressive left”, that this fusion of politics and religion is really the domain of those on the Right – so I’m thinking of, say, the Orange Order, that we discussed in Series One of this podcast, or the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas that’s been, you know, explored, depicted famously here, at least by Louis Theroux in more than one of his documentaries. You know, they’re known for kind of pro-life homophobic views, almost, to put it mildly. Is it really the case that it’s typically those on the Right who mix politics and religion? Or even maybe that it’s religious people who tend to be more right wing? Or is that something which needs to be myth-busted?

**RH:**

For sure. So I think two things first, religious communities are like any … pick any community, geographic community and ethnic community, a religious community is very diverse, you will find people who are right wing, and you will also find people who are not. And you will find people who radically disagree with one another in the same religious community. I think that we associate religion with right-wing politics because there was a marriage between, or an unholy alliance as it’s often being called, between right-wing politicians and a particular few Christian denominations in the United States in particular, who have been both very politically successful, but also very culturally successful. It’s received a lot of attention. And I think all of the political stuff that happens on the left – and there is a lot – just doesn’t get anywhere near as much attention.

**AB:**

You mentioned the left there. I guess there are also certain cliches like the peace-loving Quaker, and that’s the kind of quite immobile, not very evolving stereotype of the peace-loving person of faith, which I guess, is also equally reductive.

**RH:**

Exactly. What’s interesting, is that there are definitely peace-loving Quakers out there and peace-loving, you know, religious people that are from non-Quaker religious communities. But people are really complicated, too. I study religious people involved in environmentalism and you can find people who are really, really supportive of environmentalism. And then they might struggle with some of the progressive social ideals that often come along with the left environmental movement. And so this idea of, you know, what does it mean to be on the left? Do you have to tick all of the boxes of all of the issues?

**AB:**

You’ve done research that adds a bit of nuance to all of this. And that includes your study of a group called the Sydney Alliance based, of course, in Australia. Yeah. Tell me very briefly, just who they are, how would you introduce them,

**RH:**

The Sydney Alliance are a coalition of civil society organizations, they’re made up of lots of different organizations across the spectrum of religious and non-religious groups in Sydney. So it’s very geographically located: you’ve got trade unions, you’ve got a fairly diverse range of religious organizations. And you have a whole heap of secular civil society groups, environmental groups, for example. And it’s all people who are interested in working for the common good in Sydney together and coming together and sort of pooling resources, pooling power, I guess, by bringing lots of people together.

**AB:**

And you did quite in depth fieldwork, you attended various meetings and trainings. What were your main findings from studying this coalition? I mean, what can you teach us about how to live together or even about what “democratic community” in quote marks really is? In practice, rather than a theory?

**RH:**

I think one of the things that was really interesting about the Sydney Alliance was that they take people for who they are, in the public sphere, and they welcome people’s full identity into the public sphere. And that, from my perspective, as someone who studies religion, that’s really interesting, because they want Catholics and Hindus and Muslims to come as Catholics and Hindus and Muslims into the public sphere.

**AB:**

And also, presumably, with the other dimensions of their identity, so they’re coming as multi-dimensional people, which we’re allowed to do less and less, it feels.

**RH:**

Yeah. And you can hear some amazing stories from participants in the Alliance who talk about, you know, they are there as a member of a union, but they are also religious. And they’ll go to a big public assembly, where you hold political leaders to account for example, and there’s a roll call, where the different organizations have their organizational name called out and every member of that stands up, and this person who’s there from a union, let’s say, when they call out the church group that they belong to, they get to stand up to that as well. And lots of people talk about that as being so affirming, and empowering, for them to have that part of their identity recognized in the public sphere. Where it’s not, it’s something that’s just not a part of their sort of public life.

**AB:**  
It was taboo.

**RH:**

Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s, that’s a really interesting thing, this idea of not just being accepting, but actually welcoming and affirming people’s multiple identities and public life. And, and seeing the strength that diversity brings to a democracy.

**AB:**

I mean,it does sound like there is a lot to celebrate in the Sydney Alliance. And it was really described very briefly there. But I suppose you could say, well, it’s all well and good to celebrate this, this explicit presence of religion and of people’s faith as part of their identity, etc, within public life. Until we don’t like the politics that particular group or person might bring along with them. So homophobia, for example, or for some people, pro-life views. What then? Because I guess there is often this thing where we might celebrate, like people on the secular left, or just people who were secular, often might *like* certain religious people who are aligned with their own worldview, or think “oh, that person’s religious, but they’re all right, actually”. That person will get kind of admitted into there, could be even their friendship group. Actually, I know that that was the case. When I was a student, I can think of various sort of religious students who were, like religious, but you know, yes, but what about people who are more objectionable? What happens? What happens then, when those views are brought to the table?

**RH:**

This is not just a challenge for an organization like the Sydney Alliance. I think this is like a challenge of democracy. When you live in any kind of pluralist society, you have to deal with the fact that people have very divergent views from one another, and we’re not going to get on, we’re not going to like what everyone says, but we’re all part of the same community. In the Sydney Alliance, they only work on the things that they can agree on. So for example, during the same sex marriage campaign in Australia and the debate in the plebiscite that we had here, the Alliance didn’t take a public position on the debate. Because there were some organizations that opposed it. And there were some organizations that supported it. They did encourage organizations that agreed with one another to work together separately to the Alliance. And they were very sort of hands off in terms of what that might look like. And they also made sure that everyone recommitted to working together, even though they disagreed with one another. And I think it’s really hard. It’s not a perfect solution. But I think what they try and do is, is come back to this idea of committing to sitting down and finding commonality somewhere, if it’s not on this issue, like what is the thing that we can take action on together? Or that we can work on together? And having that in common, is that enough to keep us in alliance with one another and keep us working together?

**AB**:

You talk about the Sydney Alliance as obviously implicitly allowing people of faith to kind of show themselves and talk about themselves as being of faith within the city, the urban context, I guess, that maybe challenges some assumptions, or some kind of illusions, or even delusions that we have about the city as a secular space. And this is the point that you of course, make: this idea that, you know, the city is almost conceptually distinct. It’s the absolute polar opposite from religion. And I guess that’s going back to this kind of rational, irrational distinction that needs to be broken down. What would you say to that? It seems that your work immediately shatters that illusion.

**RH:**

I mean, well, cities are …. the thing that makes cities so amazing is that they’re these kind of concentrations of diversity. And inherent in that diversity is, you’re gonna end up with religious diversity in there. And in a way, it’s actually kind of part of what gives cities this, this aura of cosmopolitanism, and being an exciting and interesting place to live, because there is all this really different stuff going on.

**AB:**

Yeah, and you talk about this idea, that this religious super-diversity lends a particular aura to secular life: whether that’s activists meeting in a church crypt, something maybe quite a lot of listeners would relate to, or atheists enjoying living in a place that they might kind of problematically term “vibrant”, because of the religious communities that serve as a bit of a backdrop to their life of consumption, in a way. Yeah, I wonder what your reflections are on this, this idea that, even if we’re not religious ourselves, we experience religion as a kind of backdrop that we can kind of dip into, pick and choose, take a photo of, etc, without really engaging, in the city?

**RH:**

There’s a sense in which … there’s a couple of things I think that religious communities often are: you see people relating to each other in communities, like literally in community in a way that can be unusual in the context of a city, when we’re talking about a city. It can be very alienating to live in a city and the sort of communal bonds that you might find in smaller towns, and that kind of thing can be broken down. And so when you’re sort of on the outside, I guess, a non-religious person, and you’re seeing in your neighborhood, you know, a particular religious group that comes on the same day, every day, and the people, they stand around talking. And there’s this real sense of relationship and community that it looks like it’s a really lovely thing, in and of itself. And it also feels really different. Like if you’re not, if you’re not a member of a religious community, then the rituals and the way people dress and all that kind of thing, from any particular religious community, is this kind of aesthetic.

**AB:**

Yeah, it’s a kind of aesthetic boost or something, isn’t it? And it’s, I think you’ve mentioned: religious spaces are not kind of neoliberal spaces. So for activists meeting in a church crypt, that’s much better than meeting in a Costa coffee. Some people might disagree with that. Then also, I mean, I could think even recently, with perpetual lockdown here in the UK, where I recently went for a walk with my mum, around the cathedral in the area where she lives and we walked through the cathedral, and it was really peaceful. And I walked there also with a friend recently, and that added a kind of a different tone to our conversation. In a way despite my not being religious because we were in this space where you couldn’t buy anything. It was peaceful, you knew you had to be kind of hushed and quiet. And that shapes how you experience conversation, or the city that you’re walking around at that point.

**RH:**

Yeah, I mean, I think that in contemporary cities, so much so-called public space is now dominated by a commercial logic and it’s really hard to find truly public spaces. You can go and you can just be and you’re not under the pressure to buy anything. And when you’re meeting people and there’s a pressure to buy something, it kind of puts you in a slightly different relationship with them. What’s really different about religious spaces is that they’re designed for congregation so they’re designed to bring people together, most of the time, and not asking for money.

**AB:**

You’re listening to “With Reason” where I’m talking to the sociologist Rosie Hancock, about her work on religion and politics. If that’s something you’d like to explore a bit more, you can listen again to our interview with the anthropologist Joseph Webster from Series One. He’s done some really interesting research on radical Protestantism in Scotland. And if you want to hear more from “With Reason”, including upcoming discussions on everything from free speech to science, hope to immigration, please do press pause right now and click subscribe in whatever app you’re using. It costs absolutely nothing and it will help us to make more episodes for you. And on that it’s time for a quick word from New Humanist editor Samira Shackle.

**SS:**

Here at New Humanist, were interested in ideas, science, culture, and crucially debate. Whatever your beliefs, you’re sure to find something within our pages that will stretch and might even change your mind. And here’s something else to make you think. We’re offering listeners a year subscription to the magazine for just £13.50. That’s fourr beautiful print editions delivered straight to your door, just head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code “With Reason”. Thanks for listening.

**AB:**

Okay, so, so far today we’ve talked about various kind of stereotypes to do with religion and politics and the idea of the interaction between the two. And we’ve also talked about the intersection of those things in the Sydney Alliance, which you’ve studied. Let’s now move to the research that you did for your book, “Islamic Environmentalism: Activism in the United States and Great Britain”. So, first of all, tell me about the research question behind that book. As I understand it, it focuses upon Muslim activists and Islamic organizations that approach environmentalism as a religious duty. Tell me about how you studied that. And what brought you to the subject, not being of Muslim faith yourself?

**RH:**

Yeah. Well, I think there was a whole lot of research into Christian environmentalism. And there was also quite a bit into Buddhism and a bit into Hinduism as well (some of which is a little bit problematic, somehow, essentially, environmental in and of themselves, but that’s sort of another discussion for another time). And there really wasn’t very much about Islamic environmentalism. I actually stumbled upon it. So I did a Masters in Islamic Studies. I was researching Muslim woman bloggers, and one of the women that I was looking at was an environmentalist. And she had all of these resources on her blog. And I thought that was so interesting, I sort of dived into this rabbit hole. And at some point I went ‘hang on, there’s a PhD thesis in this’, and it’s sort of what I ended up doing. And I really wanted to explore how religion was brought into the politics or the environmental politics, I think, in a way that took account of or took better account of what I think of as the two-way relationship between the religious and the political, when you get religion involved in political life. So a lot of social movement theory hasn’t been great. And accounting for religion, talks about all of the instrumental resources that religion can bring to politics, but doesn’t really talk about how politics might transform or change religious communities, and also doesn’t talk about some of the more symbolic or spiritual, if you will, things that religion brings into political life. And so I was interested in exploring that in the context of Islamic environmentalism.

**AB:**

And how are you define Islamic environmentalism, as opposed to say, secular environmentalism? And again, as you mentioned before, when you’re talking about each faith, you know, surely there are many environmentalisms within Islam, there can’t just be just be one?

**RH:**

Definitely. I mean, so in the context of the book, when I was going out and doing my field work, I was finding organizations that identified as being Islamic and were involved in environmental work, and I was interviewing people. So not everyone was aligned with an organization, but I was interviewing people who self-identified as Muslim and would say that they were environmental activists – or if not *environmental* activists that they were activists whose activism was very relevant to environmentalism. So it was a very loose definition – exactly like you said, there’s lots of different types of environmentalism. There’s also lots of different Islam. You know, it’s really, it’s not my place to define who isn’t Muslim, or what is authentically Islamic or not.

**AB:**

And you were interested, not so much in theory, but in practice, if I’m right, in a kind of lived religion, and how these activists talk about their environmentalism in the context of their religion, and vice versa, but kind of seeing very much how this all works on the ground at the level of speech, how people sort of talk about what they do?

**RH:**

Yeah

**AB:**

If I’m correct?

RH:

Yeah

**AB:**

I mean, one example that you give of how the spiritual and the political can be inextricable in this kind of chicken and egg type way: rather than kind of one thing, always leading in a mono-directional way to the other. It’s of an Islamic scholar who was a chaplain at an Ivy League college, I think in the US (I’m assuming, of course) and his family had stopped eating meat, and he decided to eat only what he could hunt for himself. And I thought that example was really fascinating. This sense that hunting was kind of spiritual for him, but also environmental. So political.

RH:

Yeah

AB:  
And practical.

RH:

Yeah, definitely. So the decision that they made as a family was that they were not going to support the industrial meat complex, I suppose, which they found deeply unethical. But when he spoke about hunting, he talked about how being out in nature and the act of hunting itself, he felt, bought him into closer relationship with God, and was a really spiritual practice. And so yeah, the act itself becomes both. The act of giving up buying meat is political, and the hunting is spiritual, but the two are inextricably sort of interwoven with one another. And it’s really hard when you talk to him about this, and when you talk to other sort of examples in other contexts of this, but if you said to them, is this a political thing? Or is this a religious thing? They’d say: well, you know, it would be kind of both at the same time, like, does it have to be one or the other? You know, they wouldn’t really differentiate between the two. It’s almost like a nonsensical question.

**AB:**

Well, staying on that theme, I suppose, and this idea of the relationship between religion or faith and environmental politics.. let’s turn to the New Humanist’s archive for a piece that resonates with what we’ve been talking about. So we’ve got an article from quite a good while ago, from 1979, by Don Marietta, titled “Ecological Humanism”, which really speaks to this question who is better placed to care for the natural world? Is it people of religious faith or people of none? I’m guessing it’s much more complicated than that, of course, Rosie. That piece begins by saying this: humanism has been seen by some environmentalists as the philosophical influence behind modern disregard for the natural environment. The charge against humanism, especially by religious writers, is that it is anthropocentric, hence unable to give proper value to the non-human world. Now, the author himself does go on to reflect on this and of course, challenge it. And I think he says, really, it’s based on a misunderstanding of what humanism really is. Is this a view that you have encountered in your research, this idea that actually being a person of faith might in fact help you to care more for the natural world? I mean, earlier, you talked about these religions, which are seen as somehow a bit more environmental, kind of, in a very essential fashion. So you know, Buddhism, I would add maybe Jainism to that – definitely, especially – what would your reflections be on this?

**RH:**

What is really interesting is, in the late 60s, there was an article published by a historian called Lynn White Jr. called ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’. And Lynn White, Jr. actually put the blame on occidental Christianity and said that occidental Christianity sort of inculcated this view of domination over nature, and that that particular view sort of has permeated society so that even people who aren’t Christian have accepted it, but really its origin is this kind of particular type of Christianity. I mean, he concludes the article actually by saying that the only way to get out of this type of dominating worldview is to go back to Christianity. You want to go back to religion, and sort of reinterpret it or or find new ways of thinking about humans’ relationship with nature. But I find that so interesting, because it seems like you can level that challenge of being anthropocentric against a great many, let’s call them “worldviews” or belief systems,

**AB:**  
religious or otherwise.

**RH:**

Religious or otherwise, exactly. And so, these debates are really live in religious communities. I mean, my answer is that I don’t think being a person of faith can help you care more for nature than people not of faith, and a lot of the religious environmentalists that I researched struggle in their own communities to get people to take environmentalism seriously enough, or at least they have in the past.

**AB:**

I mean, it’s obvious – obviously you’re saying, you know, that, of course, we need really a more nuanced approach that there are kind of, arguably strands of thought, both secular and religious, that frame our relationship to the natural world, in a way that sometimes isn’t most conducive to acting to protect and secure for future generations, you know, and that sometimes it is ….. but I guess, from a kind of rationalist perspective, you could say, if you’re an evangelical Christian, say, in the US, and you just don’t believe in evolution, you’re not really going to believe in the science of man-made climate change. Surely, science is somehow more reliable as a basis for action, you could say, than faith?

**RH:**

I mean, that makes sense for *you*, of course, because you already think that science is a more logical basis. We get back to this tricky thing of living in a plural society, right? Where people, what motivates people to take action can come from really different epistemology, like really different ways of understanding how we know what we really know, what the world really is, like, from different kinds of ethical, you know, what’s the right or wrong way to act in the world, we come from such different perspectives. And so there are, there is a certain strand of evangelical Christians in the US and elsewhere, for whom climate change is false, or is not a problem. There’s even Australians that think climate change is real, but it’s like God’s punishment, and it signals the end times, and so we should be welcoming it because the rapture is coming. You know, like, you’ve got a bit of this. There’s lots of different flavours out there of how Christians understand climate change. And you also have lots of Christians who think we need to pay attention to the science.

**AB:**

I mean, it’s certainly not going to be resolved in this discussion. But of course, there are many, many factors beyond religion, which shape a person’s attitude to, I guess what their duty is towards Planet Earth. But yeah, Rosie, thank you very, very much for joining us from Sydney. Thanks.

**RH:**

Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here.

**AB:**

The sociologist Rosie Hancock, they’re joining us from Sydney. And with me now again, is Samira Shackle, editor of New Humanist magazine. And Samira, what did you make of what Rosie had to say?

**SS:**

It was fascinating to hear Rosie speak. And I think some of what she said was quite challenging. To those of us from a from a non-religious perspective, I was really interested when she questioned you, when you were talking about the distinction between the rational and the irrational. And I know she said she didn’t want to give a lecture on it. But I think I would have really liked to hear her talk more about tha,t almost. Yeah, about how exactly she’s defining the rational and the irrational because it does seem – and again, maybe this is my own bias showing – but it does seem that there is this sort of clear binary between religious belief and scientific evidence and so on. That seems like a perhaps an obvious point, in a way … but it was interesting to hear her talk about the way that people, whether they’re religious or not, hold multiple identities, and that those multiple identities and multiple perspectives that each sort of complicated individual can hold, inform how people behave in public life. And so we can’t assume a single set of values simply because of someone’s religious or non-religious affiliation. I think there’s a whole host of different views that are contained within each one of those identities, many of us have more than one.

**AB:**

Yeah, I think for me, beyond it being about religion and politics, just in a more broad sense, it was a discussion which reminded us of the importance of not talking in extremely kind of simplistic reductive ways about people’s identities, or beliefs, or political persuasions, and that kind of thing.

**SS:**

Yeah, I guess she’s talking about religion and politics and so on. But there was a lot there about compromise and working together that’s relevant looking way beyond the context of religion, or not religion. You’re talking about sort of finding points of commonality and points of agreement, which I think is quite relevant across the board – probably because, you know, as you said, within any community, whether that’s a religious community or a secular community, you have a vast swathe of different political views. And so I think that idea of seeking consensus and finding the points you agree on and committing to work together, even if you disagree on some pretty big things, I think, sort of sitting here in this very polarized political moment, that’s sort of interesting and heartening to hear about examples of where that can work.

**AB:**

Yeah, like the Sydney Alliance, for example. And I think that was also a reminder for me of how, really, today we live our politics in quite a dogmatic fashion. A lot of the time, you know, politics, political beliefs are performed quite inflexibly, we kind of wear them on our sleeves or on our social media profiles, or whatever. And actually, we can hold those and express those in as inflexible a manner as some people express or seem to express their religious beliefs. And so I guess that’s another way in which kind of religious belief and political belief or activism can blur, I guess. It leads us all to question, you know, whether we can truly listen to people across divides and find common ground, as you say. I also really liked her point on cities and religion and on kind of religious super-diversity. And I think I was particularly interested in that having lived recently in Tottenham, in London, for a very long time, which is a kind of super-diverse area where if you look closely, or even not that closely, actually, there’s religions kind of everywhere. And even if you are not of faith yourself, that is a backdrop to your life. I guess it made me think a bit about how, you know, secular consumers kind of dip in and out of the kind of aesthetics of religion in a way and what the ethics of that are to you. I suppose you kind of know what I’m getting at.

**SS:**

Yeah, I think I do know what you’re getting at. Although I wonder if … I don’t know … I guess I grew up in … I live in Tottenham, now, actually, and I grew up in Kilburn, so sort of spent my whole life in London and lived in a range of different areas where different religious communities are more or less prominent. And I sort of, I don’t know, maybe I don’t really notice very much. Like, I’ve never, I don’t really notice it at all, it doesn’t really factor into my day-to-day very much. And it just sort of feels like a fact of life. But I mean, I was also taken by her point about cities. I’ve just published a book on Karachi, in Pakistan, which is obviously a fairly mono-religious city. It’s also one that has more religious diversity, I think, than other parts of Pakistan, there’s a much bigger proportion of Christians and Hindus there than anywhere else. But what kind of really struck me though, is not just in a religious way, but sort of cities as a place of super-diversity and all the tension and strength that brings. I think that’s just such an interesting point of cities as a kind of point of convergence and sometimes of conflict, but also of compromise.

**AB:**

I guess that’s all for today. We will be back next week with more of course. Remember, you can find reading lists and transcripts for all episodes of “With Reason” at newhumanist.org.uk. Or find us on Twitter at @NewHumanist.

**SS:**

This podcast was presented by me Samira Shacle and series producer Alice Bloch. And our sound engineer was Dave Crackles. See you back here soon. Goodbye.

**Further reading:** 
---------------------

- ‘Islamic Environmentalism: Activism in the United States and Great Britain’ (2018), Rosemary Hancock
- ‘Religion in Coalition: Balancing Moderate and Progressive Politics in the Sydney Alliance’ (2019), Religions, Rosemary Hancock
- ‘Is there a paradox of religion and liberation? Islamic environmentalism, activism, and religious practice’ Journal for the Academic Study of Religion (2015) Rosemary Hancock
- People, Power, and Change: Movements of Social Transformation (1970) Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine
- On Social Control and Collective Behaviour (1967) Robert Park
- ‘Ecological Humanism’ (1979) Don Marietta, New Humanist Magazine