THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION

IN SECULAR SOCIETY
FROM A TAKEN-FOR-GRANTED INSTITUTION TO A CONTESTED RESOURCE

James A. Beckford
Introduction

The philosophical aspects of definitions are complex and contested.

Other contributors to this collection have demonstrated how difficult,
but important, it is to produce workable definitions of social and
cultural phenomena. Religion is no exception. It gives rise to the
same general definitional problems as do other phenomena. In addi
tion, religion is subject to some particular, if not unique, definitional
difficulties of its own. I am not in a position to resolve these difficulties
here: I merely recognise the challenges that they present to scholars
who feel the need not only to conceptualise religion but also to
demarcate it clearly from non-religion.
I want to throw a different light on religion and its definitions by
showing that, in certain circumstances, definitions have a broadly
political significance in the sense of relating to struggles for power.
I am not referring to disputes about the definition of religion for
scholarly purposes but, rather, to the controversies which surround
attempts to impose official meanings on, and boundaries around,
religion in public life. The general thrust of my argument will be
that definitions can have serious practical consequences: they can
make a difference to peoples individual lives and to their collective
interests. Moreover, scholarly discussions about the definition of reli
gion can sometimes feed into these political controversies. For exam
ple, scholars may be consulted on controversial questions such as Is
a cult really religious?. Alternatively, scholars published views may
be used without their knowledge in public disputes about the definition
of religion.
My illustrations of definitional controversies will be taken from the
recent history of the U.K., although similar examples could easily
be found in other countries. Indeed, a cross-national, comparative
study of such controversies would provide valuable insights into some

24

JAMES A. BECKFORD

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

of the sociological dynamics of religion. Such a study would be par

ticularly useful if it were able to indicate the points at which reli
gious boundary disputes were prevalent, that is, the places where
clashes occurred between competing criteria for defining religion for
practical purposes.
One of the advantages of examining the politics of official definitions
of religion is that it is not necessary for me to stipulate a particu
lar definition for my own purposes. I have the luxury of being able
to work with definitions that are already given in public forms such
as laws, regulations or educational syllabuses. It goes without saying,
of course, that the utility of particular definitions of religion which
are enshrined in official forms cannot be assumed or taken for granted.
The fact that they are official has no implications for their value or
usefulness. They are simply facts of social or cultural life. The task
of the social scientist is to study the methods by which such definitions
are constructed and the implications that they have for society and
culture.

surviving remnants of religion less, rather than more, contentious.

Very few writers have commented on this aspect of religious change,
and the literature on secularisation implies that the declining signifi
cance of religion would entail its declining capacity to excite contro
versy except possibly at the margins where exotic sectarian or cultic
movements might still stir up some strong feelings.4
My explanation for religions continuing capacity to excite con
troversy is not confined to arguments about exotic movements on
the fringe of mainstream religions in the U.K., however. Instead, I
shall point to a number of other factors which combine to increase,
rather than decrease, the likelihood that religion will continue to be
a site of controversies for the foreseeable future. I shall begin by list
ing some of the uses to which religion is put which often give rise
to friction and controversy even in so-called secular societies. In the
first place, religion serves as a language in which many people who
may no longer be associated with any religious organisations still
choose to express their strongest fears, sorrows, aspirations, joys and
wishes. Secondly, religious symbols are still widely deployed as sym
bolic markers of personal and collective identity, although the attach
ment to orthodox creeds and rites may be greatly attenuated. Thirdly,
some religious symbols serve as vehicles of challenging ideas about,
for example, the fragility of the natural environment, the sacredness
of human rights and the value of justice.
What helps to make these persisting uses of religious symbols poten
tially controversial is that the symbols are no longer the exclusive
property of religious organisations or faith communities. As so many
people remain detached from these collectivities they are no longer
subject to the control that clergy and other religious professionals
would have tried to exercise over the use of these symbols in the
past. Moreover, rising levels of educational attainment, increased
rates of social and geographical mobility and growing exposure to
the media of mass communication have further eroded the possibil
ity that religious organisations could control the uses to which their
symbols would be put. I characterised this situation as follows in an
earlier publication:

Secularisation and Religious Controversies

Before I can substantiate my claim that the definition of religion is

contentious in the U.K. I need to sketch the broad outlines of the
religious changes which have taken place there since about 1945.
Many of my observations form part of the conventional account of
secularisation1 and of the privatisation of religion,2 but my interpre
tation of these high-level transformations is significantly different in
at least two major respects.
Firstly, I share the belief that religion is currently being restruc
tured or re-positioned in many advanced industrial societies (as well
as undergoing secularisation). The restructuring of religion3 may be
just as important to the future of these societies as to secularisation.
For analytical purposes, however, these two processes of religious
change should be kept separate.
Secondly, I believe that social and cultural changes have made
religion more contentious and controversial. This seems paradoxical,
for one might have expected that secularisation would render the
1 Dobbelaere 1981; Wilson 1985; Wilson 1992.
2 Luckmann 1963, 1967.
3 Hervieu-Leger 1986, 1989.

25

4 Wilson has consistently argued that cults and sects might continue to thrive
amidst general secularisation (Wilson 1976). Others, among whom M ax W eber was
the most notable, have identified the popularity of exotic religious innovations as
evidence of secularisation in the sense of declining faith in the old gods and the
invention of ersatz deities to replace them.

JAMES A. BECKFORD

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

Religion has come adrift from its former points of anchorage but is
no less potentially powerful as a result. It remains a potent cultural
resource or form which may act as the vehicle of change, challenge
or conservation. Consequently, religion has become less predictable . . .
And the chances that religion will be controversial are increased by
the fact that it may be used by people having little or no connection
with formal religious organisations. The deregulation of religion is one
of the hidden ironies of secularisation.5
This situation may represent what Meerten ter Borg calls dein
stitutionalisation of religion,6 but unlike him I detect signs of re
institutionalisation or at least of struggles to impose new boundaries
around religion. To some extent the growth of religious diversity
in the U.K. has helped to precipitate some of these struggles.
In fact, one of the main reasons for the contentiousness of reli
gion in the U.K. is that migration of Buddhists, Hindus, Jains,
Muslims and Sikhs from the Caribbean, Hong Kong, South Asia
and East Africa since the early 1950s has sharply increased the degree
of religious diversity in the country.7 Many British-born members of
these faith communities are now children and young adults who are
living in large and well established settiements, mainly in large cities,
which are supported by numerous organisations for religious, cul
tural, political and social purposes. They are not so much commu
nities of migrants as integral, but distinctive, parts of British society.
Yet, their presence in the U.K. helps to ensure that the boundary
between religion and non-religion remains contentious.
For example, English common law makes it an offence (termed
blasphemy) to ridicule, vilify or insult the tenets of the Church of
England.8 Since this law does not apply to any other churches or
religions, those Muslims who were aggrieved by the publication in
1988 of Salman Rushdies novel, The Satanic Verses, were unable to
bring a prosecution for blasphemy. A campaign to extend the law
on blasphemy to all religions was launched, with support from the
leading representatives of various faith communities, including many
Christians, but the British Government decided in 1989 that it had
no intention of extending the legislation to cover Islam or any other

religion. Meanwhile, the controversy sparked off a different kind of

campaign to rescind the law on blasphemy, in effect depriving all
religions of legal protection against ridicule, vilification and insult.
The Rushdie Affair brought to the surface of public life in the U.K.
a series of issues not only about the relatively disprivileged status of
Islam in English (and Scottish) law but also about the alleged bias
of the law towards at least one form of religion. Non-religious beliefs
received no such legal protection. This was unjust in the eyes of
many campaigners against the law on blasphemy, although very few
Muslims took this view.
The main question was whether it was justifiable for the law to
protect any form of religion in a society characterised by low levels
of participation in religious activities and by growing diversity of reli
gions. It was widely argued that, on grounds of equity, the law should
offer protection to all religions or to none. Partly because of the
difficulty of defining religion for legal purposes and partly because
only two blasphemy cases had come to court in the twentieth cen
tury, the Law Commission9 had earlier recommended abolition of
the law on blasphemy. Other parties to the debates about blasphemy
wanted to abolish it as an offence because it represented an unwar
ranted restriction on the freedom of expression. All the varied argu
ments about extending or abolishing the law on blasphemy touched
indirectly on questions about constituting religion as a single cate
gory for legal purposes. The fact that prosecutions for blasphemy
have been extremely rare in the twentieth-century only underlines
the point that the increasing variety of faith communities in the U.K.
after the mid-century was one of the factors which helped to create
the controversy and to make it correspondingly more difficult to
define religion in a non-controversial fashion. And, according to one
of the commentators on the Rushdie Affair:
The component of culture which tends to be the most problematic
is that which has been pre-eminent in the Rushdie affairreligion.
Different religious faiths are necessarily conflicting religious faiths and,
because they concern the right and the true, a clash of beliefs offers
little scope for accommodation or compromise.10

26

5 Beckford 1989: 170-172.

5 T er Borg in this volume.
7 The settlement of large numbers of Jews and Roman Catholics in the U.K.
from the 1840s onwards had created many heated controversies of a kind which
is now being reproduced in the 1990s.
8 Bradney 1993.

27

9 Law Commission Working Paper 1981, no. 79: Offences against religion and
public worship.
10 Jones 1990.

JAMES A. BECKFORD

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

It is interesting that this quotation makes no reference to ethnicity

or race.
The fact that defining religion for legal purposes has always been
difficult in the U.K. seems strange at first glance. After all, most of
the countrys major social institutions have been directly or indirectly
shaped by Christianity for more than one thousand years. Even the
law11 which first formalised the legal and fiscal advantages accorded
to charitable trusts neglected to define religion despite the fact that
the advancement of religion was identified at the end of the nine
teenth-century as one of the four objects eligible to be charitable
in law. On further reflection, however, this situation is less strange
than it appears to be. The reason why a definition of religion was
considered unnecessary was that Christianity was the only conceiv
able instance of the category at that time. Indeed, legal restrictions
against Protestants other than Anglicans, against Roman Catholics
and against Jews did much to ensure that the public life of England
was moulded by Anglican values and institutions. This does not nec
essarily mean, however, that the majority of adults were active par
ticipants in the Church: it merely means that the institutions of, for
example, marriage, education, social welfare, health care, the law,
local government, the monarchy, Parliament and the military reflected
the Anglican ascendancy.
Various tax and financial advantages are accorded by English law
to collectivities which meet the criteria for being deemed charitable
in law. These charities must be registered with the Charity Commission
and must be administered by trustees in accordance with stringent
regulations. The fundamental assumption underlying the law on char
ities is that that they must earn their privileges by serving the pub
lic good. As late as the mid-twentieth century it was still virtually
taken for granted that only monotheistic religions could qualify for
charitable status. Today, charitable status is routinely denied to organ
isations based on non-theistic belief systems such as Scientology, sec
ularism and paganism. The Charity Commissioners (who administer
the register of charitable organisations) also have the power to refuse
registration to any organisations which clearly qualify as religions but
the purposes of which are not considered to be in the public inter
est. In the circumstances, it is hard to disagree with the following
judgement of a leading jurist in the field of religion and the law:

The need for reform is clear. At present the law is unjust because it
distinguishes between different religious adherents in a manner which
is arbitrary and incapable of rational defence. To clarify the law in a
manner which would promote religious freedom would be a difficult
task involving . . . the need to address the question of the definition of
religion . . . [T]he present law of charity provides yet another illus
tration of the mixture of bias and muddle which characterises British
laws attitude towards religions.12
My point is that the origins of the bias and muddle can be traced
back to the late medieval and early modern tendency to equate reli
gion with a particular form of Christianity and that the rapid growth
of non-Christian faith communities and philosophies of life in the
U.K. in the second half of the twentieth-century has exacerbated the
original confusion. It is notoriously difficult to assess the size of, for
example, the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities, but
they probably constitute about 3 millions of the 58 millions popu
lation of the U.K.
As in the case of the law of blasphemy, the level of dissatisfac
tion with the law of charity is reaching a point where many people
are calling for the removal of the advancement of religion from the
list of criteria of charitable status in law. The dissatisfaction is appar
ent in the following plea from a prominent columnist in one of the
U.K.s good quality newspapers:
Religion is ineffable, mysterious, an act of faith, a state of grace, a
light inaccessibly hidden from our eyesnot, in other words, the sort
of thing courts or charity commissioners should be expected to codify
and police. There is only one sane answerand that is to deregister
them all. Our secular society, where only 35 per cent of people believe
in a Supreme Being, should not be spending public funds, in tax for
gone, to finance any of these curious beliefs.13
The tone of Toynbees article also reflects a feeling of exasperation
with arrangements which tie religion and law closely together. This,
in turn, is probably part of a wider frustration with what I shall call
the juridification of everything. It suggests that religion does not
deserve the protection of the law if it needs to be juridified again,
harking back to an earlier era in which it was unnecessary to define
religion because it was coterminous with Anglican Christianity.

28

11 Charitable Uses Act 1601.

29

12 Bradney 1993: 131-132.

13 Polly Toynbee A being that works in mysterious ways, The Independent, 15 July
1996. Her articles sarcastic sub-title was Who is to say what is a proper religion?
T hat all-seeing judge of transcendental things, the Charity Commission.

JAMES A. BECKFORD

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

In short, the position of religion in the U.K. is affected by sev

eral simultaneous developments. Firstly, many of the conventional indi
cators of secularisation are on the increase, although I also recognise
that believing without belonging14 may be characterisdc of the coun
try as well and that privatised and implicit forms of religion may
still be buoyant.15 Secondly, the establishment of large communities
of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs (alongside smaller communities of
Buddhists and Jains) has challenged the taken for granted view that
it is unnecessary to define religion for legal purposes in such an over
whelmingly Christian society. Thirdly, the combination of secular
isation and diversification of religion in the U.K. is making questions
about the definition of religion more contentious. The impact of
these changes is magnified by the rapidity and intensity with which
religious controversies are nowadays portrayed in the mass media.
It would require a separate chapter to do justice to the role of the
mass media in inciting and sustaining religious controversies, but it
seems clear to me that religion is considered newsworthy only when
it is controversial.
I shall now analyse two instances of religious controversy which
have recently occurred in the U.K., both of which revolve around
boundary disputes or disagreements about appropriate ways to define
and categorise religion. Both disputes are still alive and have polit
ical implications. The first concerns Religious Education in state16
schools; the second concerns religious advertisements on television.

ular, the definition of religion has become a site of political strug

gles. One of the clearest examples of this politicisation of religion
has occurred in the previously little-known and relatively uncontentious area of Religious Education (hereafter RE). Ever since the
British state began to take responsibility for providing free and com
pulsory schooling for all children in the 1870s there has been a place
for what used to be called Religious Instruction in the school syl
labus. The content of the syllabus was decided at the level of local
government so that it could reflect the religious complexion of each
area. Schools were also required to begin each day with an act of
collective worship which, until the 1970s, was invariably Christian
in character. The children of Jews, Roman Catholics, Jehovahs
Witnesses and other denominations outside the Christian mainstream
were allowed to be absent from RE classes and collective worship
if their parents made a formal request to that effect. These arrange
ments were rarely contentious before the 1980s.
The situation changed drastically, however, when the Education
Reform Act of 1988 introduced the new principle that Any agreed
syllabus . . . shall reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great
Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teach
ing and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great
Britain. At the same time, the long-standing requirement that each
school day should begin with an act of collective Christian worship
(with alternatives permitted for non-Christians) was also strengthened
and re-specified.
The new policy on the teaching of RE had been the goal of
intense lobbying by politicians, educationalists and leading members
of mainstream churches17 who were insistent that secularisation and
religious diversification had to be counteracted by instilling the virtues
allegedly found in a common culture deriving from Britains Christian
heritage. Prominent among the campaigners were the Christian
Institute18 and the Parental Alliance for Choice in Education (PACE).
Both groups have continued to monitor implementation of the 1988
Act and responses to subsequent interpretations of its key concepts
from the Government ministry responsible for education.19 They have
also distributed practical advice to parents on how to complain

30

Religion in Religious Education

The main thesis of this Chapter, I repeat, is that secularisation and
other simultaneous changes in religion have paradoxically rendered
religion more, rather than less, controversial in the U.K. In partic14 Davie 1990, 1994.
15 See Ter Borg in this volume: A process of de-institutionalization [of religion]
is taking place. Religion is still present, but in a diffuse way. It has taken on very
much the characteristics of modern society in that it has become individualized,
often this-worldly, very pluralistic and so on.
16 I refer to council schools, i.e., schools which are fully funded or maintained
by local authorities and answerable to locally elected Councils and to the national
Department for Education and Employment (DfEE). The title of this Government
ministry has changed several times in the past two decades. It was the Department
of Education; then the Department for Education and Science; and finally, since
1996, the Department for Education and Employment.

17 Jackson 1992.
18 Bum & H art 1988.
19 In particular, DfE Circular 3/89 and DfES Circular 1/89.

31

32

JAMES A. BECKFORD

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

effectively if they suspect that RE and collective worship do not con

form with the current legislation, especially in respect of giving pri
ority to Christianity. The advice appears to have been successful in
enabling parents to frame complaints appropriately and to feed their
complaints into the process of lobbying education authorities at all
levels for more exclusively Christian RE syllabuses and more reli
gious collective worship.
In view of the British Governments apparent concern with pre
serving a common culture it is interesting to note that the stated
reason why conservative Christian activists began lobbying for a
greater Christian content of RE and school assemblies was their fear
that multifaith or life-stance orientations were undermining the reli
gious basis for moral commitments. The implication was that only
the Christian religion could fulfil this function in a predominantly
Christian society and that pupils from non-Christian backgrounds
needed exposure to Christianity in order to imbibe the common cul
ture of the U.K. The advocates of the new policy on RE were fully
engaged in a political struggle to frame Christianity as the only reli
gion capable of instilling this common culture. Other religions should
be included in the RE syllabus, according to the promoters of a
common culture, but only for comparative purposes. Christianity
should be the privileged source of moral and spiritual values.
The then Minister of State for Education, Kenneth Clark, opted
for a conservative interpretation of the Act when he circulated to
LEAs in 1991 some of the legal advice that he had received about
how a court of law might judge the extent to which any agreed syl
labuses conformed with Section 8 (3) of the 1988 ERA.20 The advice
was that syllabuses had to have sufficiently detailed contents to demon
strate conformity with the Act, and this could mean that Government
intended to take a keen interest in precisely how RE was to be
taught. The advice also suggested that RE teaching should be extended
to wider areas of morality including the difference between right
and wrong. Again, the implication is clear that, in the Governments
view as represented in the 1988 Act, the teaching of religion is not
expected to be independent from the inculcation of moral values
presumably enshrined in the British way of life or the common
culture.21 Indeed, the 1988 Act required schools to provide guid
ance on spirituality and morality.

The new-found political sensitivity about RE in schools was again

demonstrated during the parliamentary debates on the 1993 Education
Act, which translated the 1992 White Paper on Choice and Diversity
into practical effect. Attempts were made, for example, to restrict
the coverage of syllabuses to no more than any two religions and
to place in-depth study of Christianity at the heart of the subject
because it is the main historical heritage of this land. Baroness Cox,
who championed some of these ideas in the House of Lords debates,
had given an intimation of them in her writings nearly ten years
earlier. The grounds for enforcing more strictly the provisions of the
1944 Education Act regarding collective worship and RE were that
other ideologies were allegedly filling the moral vacuum left by
the churches and that there was a danger that some of these ide
ologies could prove as inimical to true education and as harmful to
our future as a nation as was the enforced adoption of the National
Socialist ideology in the German schools of the 1930s and early
1940s.22 It was also argued that churches should have made greater
efforts to challenge the alleged politicisation of the syllabus and should
have created a better appreciation of the moral arguments for the
open liberal democratic societies of the West23 and of the fate of
religion in Eastern European state socialist societies. A strong plea
was added for the continued support of independent religious schools.
In the event, the DfEs 1994 Circular on RE and collective wor
ship24 seemed to set narrower limits on acceptable forms of RE and
school assemblies than those laid down in the 1993 Education Act.
According to John Hull, The effect is to turn the school into a wor
shipping community and the assembly into a place of worship. Since
participation (and not merely presence) is required of all pupils, the
effect is that being registered on the school roll becomes an act of
religious commitment.25 There were also grounds for believing that

20 Hull 1991.
21 Esther Oxford concluded an article in The Independent (30 January 1994) on

33

new model syllabuses for RE with the Government hails religion as a barrier against
moral corruption and intolerable anarchy. Evidence for this opinion may have been
drawn from the assertion of Lord Tebbitt, a prominent member of Mrs Thatchers
governments, that the members of a society must have in common Taws, customs,
standards, values, language, culture and religion if instability in society were to be
avoided. Lord Tebbitt made this claim in the course of delivering the first Nicholas
Ridley Memorial Lecture on 22 November 1993.
22 Cox & Marks 1984: 88.
23 Cox & Marks 1984: 88.
24 DfE Circular 1/94 Religious Education and Collective W orship.
25 His interpretation may seem far-fetched but it is at least consonant with the
Minister for Educations personal preferences, as expressed in The Spectator on 2nd
October 1993: Id like more people to study science. Id like more of them to show

34

JAMES A. BECKFORD

the Circulars insistence on the predominance of the Christian reli

gion in schools, since it is central to the U.K.s national heritage,
would have the effect of persuading children from non-Christian
backgrounds that they could not be part of that heritage except per
haps as colonised minorities. It was not just that Government pol
icy seemed to involve greater control over religion in schools but
also that an attempt was being made to draw the symbolic bound
aries of the nation more tightly and exclusively. In short, a struggle
was taking place for the use of religion for the purpose of generating
social solidarity based on the Christian roots of a would-be common
culture.
Not surprisingly, some leading representatives of other faith tra
ditions protested against the apparent policy of requiring all pupils
to assimilate to the British and Christian common culture. Some
Muslim parents rebelled against the new policy for RE and collec
tive worship by withdrawing their children from these activities. In
other places, Christian parents complained that schools were accord
ing too much importance to other faiths. The result is a polarisa
tion of extreme opinions over the appropriate place and character
of religion in state schools, but the broader dispute is about the
boundary between a dominant religion and other religions. As in
most boundary disputes, however, the majority of the population
remains indifferent towards, or ignorant of, the issues which seem
to concern only people with extreme views.
Religious Advertising on Television

The second instance of a religious boundary dispute in the U.K.

concerns a struggle between the Church of Scientology and its oppo
nents over the formers eligibility to advertise its beliefs and activi
ties on British television. The Broadcasting Act 1990 provided religious
organisations with their first opportunity to place advertisements on
terrestrial or satellite channels.26 In keeping with the policy of suc
cessive Governments and broadcasting authorities on the appropri
a bit more interest, too, in other academic disciplines widr serious intellectual rigour.
I d also like more of them to believe in God and go to church, for that m atter
(Hull 1994: 10).
26 But television stations are free to reject some or all religious advertisements.
There is no compulsion to accept advertisements; and religious organisations have
no right to demand that their advertisements should be broadcast.

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

35

ate form of religious broadcasts, the 1990 Act and the regulatory
body that it created took a very cautious approach to the topic of
religious advertising.
It is the statutory duty of the Independent Television Commission
(ITC) to draw up and enforce a code governing the standards of
advertisements on the countrys two terrestrial commercial television
channels and on all existing satellite and future channels. The codes
general principles require that all television advertisements should be
legal, decent, honest and truthful, but special rules apply to reli
gious advertisements (as well as to advertisements designed to appeal
to children, financial advertisements, advertisements relating to health
and medicine, and charity advertising). The rules do not define reli
gion as such but they apply to advertising which is submitted by
or on behalf of any body with objects wholly or mainly of a reli
gious nature or which is directed towards any religious end as well
as to systems of belief or philosophy of life which do not involve
recognition of a deity but which can reasonably be regarded as equiv
alent or alternative to those which do.27 This is a highly inclusive
approach which implies greater concern with the effects of deistic and
non-deistic belief systems than with the beliefs themselves. In fact,
one of the rules explicitly forbids advertisers from expounding reli
gious doctrine and belief or from appearing to involve viewers in
acts of worship or prayer. Advertisers are also forbidden to appeal
for funds for themselves, claim to represent the only true faith, play
on fears, promote faith healing, offer counselling, direct advertise
ments specifically at viewers under eighteen years of age, offer gifts
other than publications, and seek to exploit vulnerable categories of
viewers such as the elderly or the bereaved. In fact, the only per
missible purposes of religious advertising are:
(i) to publicise events
(ii) to describe an organisations activities and ways of contact
ing it
(iii) to offer publications or videos about the organisation.
There is no doubt that this highly restrictive code is designed to pro
tect viewers from exploitative or manipulative religious organisations.
How does the advertising code identify exploitative and manipu
lative organisations? The Guidance Notes which accompany the code
specify that advertisements are not acceptable from bodies whose
27 Independent Television Commission, 1995: 30.

JAMES A. BECKFORD

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

rites or other forms of collective observance are not normally directly

accessible to the general public. In other words, public accessibility is
the criterion by which the acceptability of would-be advertisers is to
be judged. ITG acknowledges that this rule is far from perfect but
claims that it is currently the best available means of reducing the
likelihood that any organisation could exploit or manipulate viewers
by placing religious advertisements on television. A similar test of
acceptability exists in the Charity Commissioners procedures for
deciding whether collectivities qualify for the benefits of charitable
status in English law. The rationale for this criterion is presumably
that religious organisations whose services and other activities are
known to the public and are accessible to all who are interested in
them are less likely than other religious organisations to put undue
pressure on participants.
I am not concerned with the plausibility of this rationale, but what
interests me is the underlying implication that the only safe or
uncontentious religion is available in meetings which are directly
accessible to the public. The IT C s code introduces an implicit dis
tinction between, on the one hand, religious organisations which are
presumed to be innocuous because their activities are open to pub
lic scrutiny and, on the other, organisations whose advertisements
are not acceptable because their activities are not sufficiently open
to public scrutiny.
This distinction was at the centre of a long-running dispute which
followed the screening of an advertisement for the Church of Scien
tology on one satellite channel in the U.K. in 1993. The audience
must have been quite small, but a conservative organisation cam
paigning to protect family values complained officially to the
ITC that the Church of Scientology was not suitable as a religious
advertiser on television because public access to its meetings was not
sufficiently direct. The ITC upheld the complaint, but the Church
of Scientology then sought judicial review of their decision. After
taking legal advice and consulting relevant experts, the ITC announced
in the Spring of 1996 that it had reversed its earlier decision. There
were no longer any grounds, in its opinion, to disqualify the Church
of Scientology from the status of an acceptable advertiser. This
announcement drew protests from anti-cult groups and statements
of their implacable opposition to any policy which would permit the
Church of Scientology to advertise itself on television. Although, at

this writing, the dispute seems to have been setded in the Scientologists
favour, it is extremely unlikely that this particular case and its under
lying issues will not return to the headlines in the future.
Turning to the wider implications of the case concerning the
Church of Scientology, it seems to me that the IT C s advertising
code makes it difficult for religious orders, brotherhoods, cults, sects,
mosques, temples, mandirs, synagogues and gurdwaras which nor
mally admit to their religious services only those people who are
qualified to participate in them to advertise on television. To put
this more provocatively, the more demanding a religious organisa
tions criteria of admission are, the less likely it is that such an
organisation will be permitted to advertise itself. The long-term effect
of the IT C s policy might be to encourage the standardisation of
religious organisations in a relatively bland, non-challenging and noncontroversial form. High demand and exclusive religious organi
sations would be, by the same token, driven out of the religious
market because they would not have access to televisionthe most
powerful medium of publicity. O f course, this is speculation on my
part, but it is based on indisputable evidence about the long-standing
policy in the U.K. of preventing controversial religious organisations
from featuring in religious programmes, although news items and
investigative documentary programmes often subject controversial
religious organisations to examination and criticism. This categori
cal discrimination against religious organisations which depart from
mainstream Christian norms might eventually become another cause
of religious controversy.
In short, the IT C s policy on religious advertising is a clear recog
nition of the fact that religion is already considered sufficiently con
troversial to require the imposition of exceptionally restrictive rules
on religious advertising on television. Moreover, these rules help to
institutionalise and to reinforce the categorical distinction between
normal or acceptable religious organisations and others whose ad
vertisements would be excluded from television. In time, it is pos
sible that other excluded religious organisations will follow the
Church of Scientologys example of challenging the ITC s ruling that
it was not an acceptable organisation to advertise itself on television.
This would signal a new phase in the paradoxical process whereby
religion becomes more controversial as its host societies become more
secularised.

36

37

38

JAMES A. BECKFORD

THE POLITICS OF DEFINING RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

Conclusion

Hervieu-Legers attempt (this volume) to transcend both functionalist

and substantive definitions of religion by focusing on the transforma
tions of religious traditions offers and interesting way of understand
ing the mutations of religion in modernity, but it still gives pride of
place to belief albeit construed in non-individualist terms.
The public imposition of narrower limits of acceptable forms of
religion has been contested, however, by a wide variety of interest
groups, thereby ensuring that the field of religion remains contro
versial in spite of growing indifference towards most religious organ
isations. The progressive erosion of the U.K.s mainstream Christian
monopoly throws the persisting expressions of serious religion into
even sharper relief. Consequently, disputes about the definition of
religion for practical purposes remain heated in a so-called secular
society. From a stricdy sociological point of view there is less rea
son to look for a regulative definition30 which might solve these dis
putes than to study the ways in which they develop in relation to
other social and cultural changes.

It is virtually taken for granted these days that advanced industrial

societies are pluralistic in the double sense of being (a) diverse in
terms of their religious composition and (b) tolerant of this diversity.
I have tried to show that the appearance of pluralism may be more
superficial than substantial in some respects. There has certainly been
an increase in religious diversity in the U.K., but the tendency has
also been for the boundaries of acceptable expressions of religion to
be drawn more and more restrictively. As competition and mobility
of members increases between religious collectivities, administrative
and legal measures have been taken to establish progressively nar
rower notions of acceptable religion, that is, the forms of religion
accepted by official authorities as eligible to benefit from tax con
cessions, a privileged position in the school curriculum and access
to television advertising.
The concern of officials is usually with criteria of religious authen
ticity. They tend to ask the question, W hat is really religious?. They
tend to respond with criteria which identify real religion in terms
of forms of organisation, collective practices and individual obliga
tions which are entirely voluntary, subject to public scrutiny and
unlikely to generate public controversy. It is common for public offi
cials to deny that they have any concern with religious beliefs as such.
This means that religion is implicitly defined by them in terms which
favour established, mainstream religious institutions.28
By contrast, it is still fashionable for social scientific students of
religion to define religion broadly as a matter of beliefs and attitudes
which, for example, evoke the felt whole or which relate human
beings to the ultimate conditions of their existence.29 Alternatively,
Hanegraaff (this volume), extrapolating from Geertzs (1966) well
known formulation, defines religion as any symbolic system which
influences human action by providing possibilities for ritually main
taining contact between the everyday world and a more general
meta-empirical framework of meaning. Byrnes moral definition
(this volume) has the advantage of associating symbols with appro
priate actions, but his explication of the definition still gives more
weight to cognitions and perceptions than to anything else. Similarly,
28 Wilson 1990: 86.
29 Bellah 1970.

39

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