Spies and Scientologists: ASIO and a controversial minority religion in Cold War Australia, 1956–83

Among all the controversial New Religious Movements to emerge since the Second World War, the Church of Scientology has arguably been subject to more scrutiny by domestic and international intelligence agencies than any other non-Islamic alternative religious group. While owing to the nature of intelligence gathering scholarly accounts of this have often been one-dimensional and brief, the situation in Australia resulting from the Archives Act 1983 has meant that historians of both intelligence agencies and new religions now have access to a significant amount of documentation illustrating the interactions between the Church of Scientology and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) for the period from 1956 to 1983. This period witnessed vacillating fortunes for the Church of Scientology which saw it become the subject of legislative bans in three Australian state jurisdictions during the late 1960s, as well as it launching a high profile, but ultimately unsuccessful, legal case against ASIO in 1979. While never considered a serious security risk by ASIO, the Church of Scientology played a minor role in a number of important events in the history of ASIO particularly during the 1970s, including participating in a wider activist campaign which sought to curtail ASIO’s operations during this period and making submissions to the first Royal Commission into the Australian Intelligence Services under Justice Robert Marsden Hope.     

Countervisions of Modernity: David Roberts,The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

David Roberts's The Total Work of Art in European Modernism extends and deepens the analysis of the counter-paradigm of redemptively inspired art to modernism's own pre-occupation with secularization. It addresses the imbalance in social and critical theory whereby progressive secular rationalization has been elevated to the sole logic of modernity, and the romantic redemptive tradition has been reduced to a marginal counter-enlightenment. The total work of art paradigm allows Roberts to demonstrate how the programme of modernity has been constituted by internal tensions and antinomies from the very beginning.     

Heaven's Talent Scout: Prime Ministerial Power,Ecclesiastical Patronage and the Governance of Britain

In the last decade the role of the Prime Minister in the process for making senior Church appointments has changed significantly. The man who replaces Dr Rowan Williams—and it will be a man—will be appointed through a procedure in which the Prime Minister is expected to enjoy no choice but to simply confirm the Church of England's preferred candidate. The aim of this article is to draw upon fresh empirical research in order to explore why and how the politics and governance of ecclesiastical patronage has been recalibrated in this way. More importantly this article seeks to embed the study of ecclesiastical patronage within a much broader appreciation of how other forms of ministerial patronage have also become tightly constrained. This, in itself, forges a connection between the role of politicians in senior Church appointments, on the one hand, and a much richer and broader seam of research and writing that poses distinct questions about the nature of modern governance, the benefits of depoliticisation, the accountability of appointment commissions, the capacity of politicians and the future of democracy.     

The “brand” of the Catholic Church in England and Wales: Challenges and opportunities for communications

This paper considers the concept of “brand” in relation to religious organisations and, in particular, the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It explores the application of marketing and branding concepts to the Church and reports on perceptions of the Church's brand and identity. The findings show that the Catholic Church in England and Wales has very strong brand equity and high levels of brand loyalty among its members, although conventional marketing language should be avoided due to the sensitivities involved. The findings suggest that the Church could usefully be regarded as a “brand community,” akin in many key respects to brand communities in the commercial sphere. It recommends that Church communications could be enhanced by leveraging the brand more effectively as within a true “brand community” for the purpose of encouraging brand loyalty and energising Church members.     

The Baroque, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Latin American Political Culture

This article offers a general view about the contemporary theoretical debate in Latin‐American concerning the idea of modernity. For some authors, modernity is part of Latin‐American history, and its ruts can be found in the baroque experience of the continent, for others, the consequences of modernity such as urbanization, industralization and hope in democracy shows the Latin America is in essence a modern territory, despite the academic difficulties to understand and visualize Latin‐American identity as an integral element of the concept of modernity.     

Social Change and Moral Politics: the Irish Constitutional Referendum 1983

The dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has been challenged by rapid socioeconomic change. To counter emerging secularist trends, anti-abortion activists pressurized the political parties to agree to hold a referendum for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Opposition to the referendum, and party divisions, led to the active involvement by the Catholic Church and the hierarchy in the campaign. Although the amendment was passed, the intervention of the Church has not been beneficial to it as an institution. This is the first time since the establishment of the Irish state that a significant cleavage has emerged around a religious issue. The referendum reflected a change in Irish politics—new divisions had emerged, based on age, class, religion and place of residence. This change is now having an impact on the political parties.     

Terrorist Attacks on Western Civilization

This special issue of Public Choice is designed to afford leading scholars the opportunity to apply the principles of public choice, law and economics, and the economics of religion in analyzing the nature and consequences of the early twenty-first century assault by Islamic terrorist groups on Western civilization. These attacks are designed to wipe out all the religious, economic, legal and political advances of more than half a millennium that have occurred in the West following the awakening in the fifteenth century of a Renaissance that broke the religious yoke imposed by the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The terrorists are motivated by hatred, intermingled with envy, of Western civilization, and by a willingness to deploy wanton mayhem as a vengeful response to their own perceived helplessness before the ruthless autocracies that dominate their Middle Eastern environments. By their actions, these terrorist groups intend to restore a fundamentalist Islamic Caliphate across the Muslim world and to eliminate all links with the advanced democracies. By successfully analyzing the rational choice nature of this serious threat to modernity, the special issue demonstrates the continuing relevance of the public choice research program in an increasingly dangerous world.     

Towards a Free Market in Religion

While most nationalised enterprises have been privatised and made subject to the market, the Church of England, with considerable but not complete autonomy, remains ultimately a state controlled and governed organisation. The growth of secularism and religious diversity has demonstrated that the Church has failed in its mission to be the Church of all the people of England. Its share of the marriage market has shrunk to one in four and most weddings are now secular. It retains a monopoly of UK state religious ceremonial but in attempting to adjust to contemporary forms of religiosity it has become, in contradiction of its founding 16th century articles, the leader of official state interfaith activities and the arbiter and broker for the participation of a restricted range of other religious denominations in state activities. Releasing the Church from state control and creating a more open market for religion and belief will create a level playing field for all denominations and a better correspondence between citizen attitudes and public actions.     

The Monarchy,the State and Religion: Modernising the Relationships

Aspects of contemporary monarchy and government in relation to religion are out of step with contemporary society and require systematic reform. The removal of religious and gender discrimination in the arrangements for succession to the monarchy would be in conformity with modern anti‐discrimination attitudes. The monarchy should also consider stepping back from its religious role. The monarch has an official role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England but less than a quarter of the population identify as Anglican and in its current attempts to be inclusive the monarchy seeks to respect and support other religions whose beliefs and practices are at variance with those of the C of E and the general population. In Scotland a new settlement could be promoted by the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland (comparable to the situation in Wales and Northern Ireland) and the ending of separate Roman Catholic state education.     

'Fundamentalism', modernity and the new Jacobins

This paper offers an interpretaion of 'Islamic fundamentalism', especially the Iranian Revolution, in the context of sociological debates about 'modernity'. The problematic nature of both these terms is acknowledge. It criticizes explanations of 'fundamentalism' that begin from the assumption of a dichotomy between fundamentalism and modernity, arguing instead for a more nuanced understanding of both Islamic revivalism and the modern. The paper begins by offering a model of modernity as a set of bi-modal tensions within which Islamic 'fundamentalism' could be understood as a form of modernist revolutionary populism. This argument is then developed through a comparison betwen the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. It argues that there are parallels between the idea of Islamic revolution and the Jacobin revolutionary imagination, which demonstrate with some observations on Islam, and the closure of the Jacobin revolutionary project.     

Witness testimony from the Church Committee hearings on covert action, 1975

One of the most controversial uses of intelligence by the United States is covert action – secret efforts to change the course of history by intervening secretly into the affairs of other nations or factions. In 1975, the Church Committee held hearings on this subject – a rarity – and four expert witnesses laid out for the panel their recommendations for changes in the conduct of covert action. This dip into the intelligence archives by Intelligence and National Security reveals that much has changed in the world of covert action since 1975, with some of the witness recommendations coming to fruition and others widely ignored.     

Secularization and modernization in Turkey: the ideas of Ziya Gökalp

The pupose of this essay is to re-evaluate the ideas of Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), the official ideologue of the Young Turk movement and holder of the first chair of sociology at Istanbul University (1912), whose significance within the history of secular political thought and practice in Turkey remains inadequately explored. Focusing on Gökalp's view of the relationship between nationalism, religion and modernity in the Turkish context, I offe both an account of existing Anglophone interpretations of Gökalp's ideas and an alternative intepretation. In the latter, I seek to identify a conceptual frame in Gökalp's thought: the set of concerns and historical developments which comprise what I call the secularization problematic of modernity and which has implications for understanding his view of the relationship between religion and modernity in general and between Islam and Turkish nationalism in the context of modernization in particular.     

Tuvalu and You: The Monarch,the United Kingdom and the Realms

The government plans to amend the royal succession rules by making primogeniture gender blind and ending marriage to a Roman Catholic spouse as a disqualification for succession. Achieving these goals means that the UK is dependent on the agreement of the fifteen Commonwealth countries—the ‘realms’—that also have the Queen as head of state. The article questions whether these proposals go far enough when leaving intact other religious discriminatory rules hostile to Catholics and all others who cannot be in communion with the Church of England. It is maintained that a political disinclination to address and, as necessary, challenge the real as opposed to the formal position of the Church of England vitiates the government's approach. Moreover, it is asked whether the policy process itself should not become more open and democratic both within the UK and between the realms.     

Religion and the Scottish Independence Referendum

The Scottish independence referendum debate, like the Act of Union of 1707, has significant religious dimensions. The Act gave special recognition through the monarch to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Church, a national church, has not yet declared a position on independence, but is seeking to protect its existing privileges whatever the result. The Roman Catholic Church, recognised by the Scottish Parliament, unlike its formal rejection by the UK Parliament and monarchy, symbolically associates itself with the case for independence. Paradoxically, Catholics supporting independence subject themselves, in their religious lives, to an authoritarian foreign power. The SNP Scottish Government attempts to draw Roman Catholic support for independence from its traditional support base in the Labour Party by cultivating a sense of religious grievance that is not justified by the evidence. Old religious divisions are still relevant but non‐religion is growing fast and resulting in new perspectives on the independence debate.     

Secular spaces and religious representations: reading the headscarf debate in Turkey as citizenship politics

Although in recent years there has been a relaxing attitude in Turkey towards wearing headscarf in the public sphere, the controversy surrounding the visibility and use of the headscarf has often been read through modernity/tradition dichotomy which sees the use of headscarf by women as a threat to modernity by religious subjectivities. The principal reason for this reading is that the citizenship regime in Turkey has not been simply about defining a framework of membership to a political community but rather has been used to construct modern subjectivity. This article attempts to dislocate the headscarf controversy from this dichotomous reading by moving it into the larger framework of citizenship politics. It argues that instead of interpreting the growing visibility of the headscarf within the public sphere that pits modernity against tradition, we need instead to identify the wearing of the headscarf as a specific ‘act of citizenship’ that challenges dominant citizenship practices.     

With Arms Wide Shut: Threat Perception,Norm Reception,and Mobilized Resistance to LGBT Rights

This article utilizes original survey and interview data to explore why norms governing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights mobilize an active resistance in some cases and not in others. Based on a comparison of Poland and Slovenia, this article shows that differing perceptions of threat define the way international norms are received in distinct domestic realms. Threat perception is heightened in cases where religion is historically embedded in the essence of the popular nation. In Poland, the Catholic Church created a role for itself as a symbol of the nation. There, the domestic opposition succeeded in framing a narrative that linked LGBT rights to external forces threatening national values. By contrast, the Catholic Church in Slovenia could neither maintain nor (re-)establish similarly strong ties to the popular nation, stifling the opposition's ability to mobilize a robust popular resistance. Whether resistance is effectual, however, is a related but separate question. The data suggest that resistance produced in high-threat contexts can be self-defeating in that it enhances the salience of the norm in the domestic setting.     

Dis-embedding the Sexual/Social Contract: Citizenship and Gender in Nepal

Carole Pateman's work has been central to feminist critiques of the social contract, revealing it to be better understood as the sexual/social contract in which not only is the contracting individual male, but constructed through the active exclusion of women from the pact. These gendered roles are argued to be the result of the restructuring of society in the advent of modernity. The ramifications for the relationship between gender and citizenship in the non-West where modernity has taken a different trajectory are unclear. By mapping out the nature of citizenship as it evolves in its historical form in Nepal, this article argues not only that citizenship comes to be gendered in historically and culturally specific ways, but that the specific manner in which Nepal has been inserted in the late capitalist global economy--via 'development'--has resulted in de-politicized forms of citizenship with local and global constraints on the enlargement of its political potential.     

Hegel,Habermas and the Spirit of Critical Theory

Abstract

This paper explores the complex relation between Hegel and Habermas. Centring the discussion around the key themes of philosophy, modernity and political philosophy, it argues for a gradual re-approachment of Habermas towards Hegel. In the final section on critical theory, it takes up the question of the spirit of this theory to offer a more trenchant critique of Habermas' theoretical short coming from this perspective.     

生存现状、话语演变和异质的声音——90年代以来的同性恋研究

90年代末以来,在酷儿全球化趋势下,中国同性恋从疾病、变态、政治上不正确的性关系转变成非病理化和非罪化的主体间人格关系。作为现代性后果的中国同性恋话语在20世纪经历了从包容-抑制-重新包容的演变过程。然而,当前的同性恋叙述存在话语垄断现象,主体自主性的话语、知识和声音被总体化的宏大叙事所压制,这种压制不仅来自异性恋社会,也来自同性恋社区本身。近20年的同性恋研究大致经历了从行为到身份、从本质论到建构论的转变。     

How are U.K. churches using social media to engage with their congregations?

Churches are important non‐profit organisations that are increasingly adopting social media. In order to contribute to understanding of the value of social media as a communications channel for non‐profit organisations, this article examines, and develops a typology of, the uses of social media by two global churches with a strong presence in the United Kingdom, Hillsong, a megachurch, and the Church of England. Informed by previous typologies of the use of social media in both commercial and non‐profit contexts, content analysis was conducted of Hillsong's and the Church of England's social media platforms on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. This analysis provided the basis for the formulation of a typology of uses, the main categories of which are building a brand, building the church community, outreach, and developing spiritual mission. Differences between the approaches adopted by the Church of England and Hillsong are outlined. Suggestions are offered for future practice and further research.