Qualified rationalism and marginal religion: responses to potentially dilemmatic positions within British Unitarian text and talk on rationalism and religion

When?

Monday 18 October 2010, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

Room 19AD04 (AD building) University of Surrey

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Adrian Coyle

In the contemporary British cultural context, the place of religion in public life has been subjected to sustained and polarised debate, with the best-selling 2006 book by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, being represented as providing a catalyst or focus for critique. The basic argument advanced by Dawkins and others is that, in light of Darwin’s theory of evolution and contemporary scientific knowledge, belief in God is irrational. The form of rationalism that these writers construct as having vastly more credible and authoritative claims to ‘truth’ than religion is ‘science’ and the ‘scientific method’.

This paper briefly reviews literature on rationalism(s) and religion, noting that attempts to synthesise these discourses can present ideological challenges and dilemmas. Questions then arise concerning how members of religious traditions and groups which define themselves at least partially in terms of rationalism manage the discourses of rationalism and religion in their constructions of their traditions and groups. In this study, British Unitarianism was selected as an examplar of such a tradition. Data consisted of 62 issues of the fortnightly Unitarian publication The Inquirer (January 2008-June 2010) and four focus groups (with 26 participants) drawn from three Unitarian congregations in London, south east England and the Midlands. Data were subjected to discourse analysis.

Two major themes that characterised the data will be examined: ‘Constructing Unitarianism and the religious “Other”’ and ‘Unitarianism and rationalism: qualified accord’. The relationship between the category of Unitarian(ism) and the category of religion was heavily qualified, with institutional, orthodox religion consistently positioned as ‘Other’ to Unitarianism and as characterised by ‘dogma’. In contrast, Unitarianism was constructed as a questioning ‘spirituality’ and action-oriented ‘community’, distinctive in terms of allowing lines of religious, spiritual and philosophical inquiry to be pursued fully. This provided the basis for much of the discursive work that was transacted around Unitarianism, rationalism and religion. A scientific version of rationalism was constructed as consonant with Unitarianism but not as exclusively characterising it. The tradition was constructed as committed to a rationalism of greater scope than the ‘scientific’ version and, more generally, rationalism was constructed as a limited basis for (explaining) all life domains. These rhetorical moves are considered in terms of the avoidance of ideological dilemmas and the light they cast on contemporary discussions of rationalism and religion.

Adrian Coyle is a social psychologist whose research interests and publications have focused on, among other issues, the psychology of religion and spirituality, identity, bereavement and loss, and qualitative psychology.