Bauman's implicit theology

Kieran Flanagan

pp. 92-126

in: Mark Davis, Keith Tester (eds), Bauman's challenge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Mixing sociology with religion and theology generates a cocktail very few English sociologists care to sip, even after 9/11. The bartending activities producing such toxic cultural and political mixtures violate the foundational aspirations of English sociology which sought to overthrow an establishment patrician culture, in which the theology of Anglicanism played a significant legitimizing part (Halsey 1987). Theology is treated as incredible, archaic and regressive. Most English sociologists are pleased to act as bouncers on the field of culture, regarding those who would plant the seeds of faith there as representing all the discipline was formed to denounce and replace. A strange land now, English society conceives of itself as living in a state of post-secularity, beyond religion and rendering civil inattention to any of its activities. Thus, in times when identity politics is shaped by inclusiveness for all, religion is bracketed with suspicion and designated as "unrecognised" and somehow unfit for inclusion in civil, refined life.