The place of religion in public life is a matter of increasing debate in the media and in communities nationally and internationally.
- For some, religious traditions which influence society create challenges which need to be addressed.
- The connection between religious commitments and issues of human rights, legal protections or constraints on faith communities, as well as issues of constitutional change need dispassionate examination in modern pluralistic societies.
- The Centre is intended to be interdisciplinary, and totally independent of any ideological commitment.
The Aims of the Centre
The Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life is committed to an open exchange of ideas.
- The Centre will include not just the voices of Christianity or other major religions, but also those who are sceptical about allowing religion to have a role in public debate or policy. Only through the contribution of many voices can the complexity of these issues in the contemporary world be addressed.
- The Centre is committed to the view and understanding that religion cannot be ignored as an important component in contemporary human life, and that the significance of this deserves serious academic investigation.
- The Centre will introduce serious academic scholarship to the relationship between religion and public life.
- The Centre will endeavour to provide resources for both civil and religious organisations as they discuss and formulate policy.
The Objectives of the Centre
The Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life, as a centre of excellence, will encourage interdisciplinary debate, drawing together leaders in civil society, politicians, academics and businessmen, to reflect on the issues and challenges concerned with religion in public life. It will do this by:
- Hosting regular seminars, lectures, and international conferences
- Organising major Public Lectures by academics and others involved in the formation of public policy.
- Stimulating original research and major publications.
- Welcoming visiting scholars.
- Providing a home for self-funded research projects connected with aspects of the Centre’s work.
The setting of the Centre
Established in 1990, Kellogg College is a graduate college within the University Of Oxford. This relationship with Kellogg College allows the Centre direct access to important physical and intellectual University resources. This setting facilitates the Centre’s ability to:
- Collaborate with other research projects across the University on topics such as law, religion and human rights.
- Actively draw upon people and resources from all relevant fields, including public, private, religious and non-religious segments of the global community.
- Utilise its status as an Oxford University Centre to engage in dialogue with academic and other institutions worldwide focusing on religion and public policy.
Centre News
19th January 2012
Equality, Freedom and Religion
Read Brian Wicker's review of Roger Trigg's last book on The Tablet webiste.
Friday, 5th August 2011
Church Times Interview: Roger Trigg, philosopher
You ask if I’m a theologian, philosophy, or ethicist: my background is absolutely in philosophy; so I regard myself as a philosopher. My work, though, is more interdisciplinary at the moment, because I’ve got to take into account law and politics – the philosophy of law and human rights in particular.
I wouldn’t separate faith and philosophy. It’s always faith in something; so you have to have an understanding of what it is. Then reason comes in at various levels. I don’t agree that faith is subjective and philosophy is objective.
Faith claims truth for everybody, and philosophy does the same thing. Philosophy encourages us to examine our presuppositions more deeply than many have the time or inclination to do, but they make those presuppositions. The more people link faith with subjectivity and a sort of magic ingredient which can’t be touched from outside and is impervious to reason … well, that is just wrong.
Faith is always faith in something. The moment you specify it, it is open to reason. If the person doesn’t exist, the faith is misplaced. Faith in God implies that there is a God, and immediately you have to bring your reason to bear.
Religious freedom is a burning issue at the moment. I’m directing the Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life in Kellogg College, Oxford. One of our projects is co-operation with the Berkley Center in Georgetown University, Washington DC, on international religious freedom; so I’m particularly preoccupied with it. This follows on from my work in the past: I wrote a book in 2007 called Religion in Public Life; and my new book, which will come out later this year, is called Equality, Freedom and Religion.
I have written a lot on general philosophy, 12 books now, and a lot were on topics such as human nature and reality. A theme running through a lot of it is an opposition to relativism. I've been against that for 40 years. I'm glad the Pope is now coming in on my side.
I’ve tried to uphold the role of reason. I’ve been very opposed to narrowing that conception so that it becomes only scientific reason.
A very negative influence on me was Professor A. J. Ayer, a noted atheist in the middle of the last century. A very, very acute mind, and I admired the way he did philosophy, but I was dead sure that what he said was wrong. He wanted to say that all religious statements were meaningless.
Faith should be rational. I get very concerned when faith is thought to be subjective, irrational, and private. On the contrary, I think that faith should be claiming truth, should take its place in public life.
A very real influence on me was my father. He was a Methodist minister, and he stimulated my interest in the philosophy of religion and philosophy in general. From a very early age, I sat listening to him preach every Sunday.
There are very considerable threats to religious freedom in many countries. The way Copts are being treated in Egypt... But I am particularly concerned with things nearer home, because I think there is an increasing secular attitude in Europe, particularly coming from the Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe. Religion is seen more and more as a marginal thing — a private thing. It’s thought that it’s important that the state is neutral.
Freedom of religion is an absolutely fundamental human right. In the United States, many people think it’s the first freedom, not just because it’s in the First Amendment, but because they think it’s basic to democracy. I mean, if you can’t be free to say what’s most important in life... At the moment, though, it does get trumped sometimes by demands for equality and non-discrimination.
I’m not saying that other rights don’t matter, but there should be a balance. At the moment, religion comes off worst.
The test is people we quite seriously disagree with: if we don’t allow them freedom of conscience, within reason, I think that’s the end of freedom.
My new book is about the tussle between the demands of equality and the demands of freedom. This doesn’t just affect Christians. In the Supreme Court, the year before last, they stopped a Jewish school having strict rules about who counts as a Jew, because of racial discrimination. It didn’t matter that it went against millennia of theological understanding of what makes a Jew.
What I’m putting forward shouldn’t be controversial: there is a list of human rights that everybody has signed up to. One of the main ones is the right to religious freedom and to manifest it. That’s as important as the right to equality or not to be discriminated against.
One or two judges recently have said religion shouldn’t be playing a big part in public life because it is basically subjective, irrational, and not based on evidence — and that, as a philosopher of religion, I utterly reject.
In the past 20 or 30 years, there’s been great pressure on philosophers to write only for philosophers. This is largely due to the Government’s research-assessment exercises. It has become too professionalised, and they don’t write for a wider audience. I firmly believe philosophy underpins all intellectual activity, and examines the assumptions of society.
Philosophy is taught in British schools. A-level philosophy is very popular, as is A-level religious studies, which is generally very much the philosophy of religion. I find students in schools are very enthusiastic. Sometimes they’re disappointed when they go to study it at university and find it’s much more sterile.
I was the first chairman of the British Philosophical Association, representing all British philosophers. Before that, I was chairman of its predecessor; so I’ve had quite a bit to do with philosophy in British universities, and also philosophy in education.
Philosophy is very cheap to teach — you just need a person, perhaps a room, and perhaps some books. As long as there’s a market for it, there’s no reason why it can’t flourish in universities.
My wife and I have three grandÂchildren, and another one is due in September. Although they live outside Washington DC, we’re lucky to be able to see them quite often.
My biggest regret is that my son, aged 17, died of leukaemia, and didn’t live to fulfil his ambitions. It was a terrible, shattering thing, but, for a philosopher, the problem of suffering is the same. It shouldn’t matter more because it happens to me than because it happens to others.
I’d just like my family to remember me, but I’d like to think that some of my writings have helped people.
When I was a child, one of things I would quite like to have become was a judge. I did become a magistrate, for ten years, and I do a lot of philosophy of law; so, I suppose, in a way I’m not a million miles away.
Undoubtedly, the most important choice in my life was to marry Julia. She’s a violinist, and teaches now. Yes, I do like music. I do mostly choral singing.
I do dislike the tendency church leaders have for making pronouncements about politics and economics when they have little expertise in those subjects. They do lose credibility. I believe they should be involved in public life and issues, but it’s a mistake to get involved in partisan arguments about reducing the deficit or whatever.
The other side is that there isn’t enough emphasis on pressing social evils — the breakdown of family structures and the erosion of the institution of marriage. When I was a magistrate, I was very struck by the connection between crime and family breakdown. It’s terribly important that there’s a mediating structure between the individual and the state. The Church is one, but the family is crucial. If they aren’t there, the state has to become more and more authoritarian.
The Chief Rabbi speaks firmly on these things, but Anglican bishops tend not to. When the Church doesn’t really stand for anything, it becomes irrelevant.
I can actually remember a sermon from when I was a boy of about ten, at our annual charter-day service (I was at Bristol Grammar School). The preacher was Canon C. E. Raven: “If you boys can’t remember anything else, I want you to remember one thing I’ve said today. Jesus is what God means by man and what man means by God.”
My favourite part of the Bible, which I see as going to the heart of the Christian faith, is 1 Corinthians 15: “if Christ be not risen... your faith is also vain.” The message of the resurrection is absolutely essential for the Christian faith. I think sometimes the Church forgets it. There’s a great tendency to narrow faith to the concerns of this world.
Apart from personal concerns, I most consistently pray for the unity of the Church. The forces of disunity within the Anglican Communion are very distressing at the moment. And by unity I also mean the way ordinary Christians treat each other at the local level — just the way people treat their neighbours. If we as Christians are not sent to be reconciled with each other, we cannot preach the gospel of peace and reconciliation to the world.
I’d choose to be locked in a church with Julia. I don’t think anyone else would be able to put up with me.
Professor Trigg was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
Are we programmed to believe in God? Not quite, but He really is all in the mind, say scientists
The Times, 13/05/2011, p.21, Ruth Gledhill
Human beings are predisposed to believe in God and the afterlife, according to a three-year study by academics at the University of Oxford. ‘It means you cannot separate religion and public life,’ said Roger Trigg, a philosophy professor and co-director of the project. ‘The mind is open to supernatural agency. There are lots of explanations. It is certainly linked to basic cognitive architecture, in other words, the way we think.’
The Cognition, Religion and Theology Project led by Justin Barrett from the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at Oxford, as well as Professor Trigg, involved 57 researchers who conducted more than 40 studies in 20 countries across atheist and religious societies. One study by Emily Reed Burdett and Dr Barrett at Oxford suggested that children below the age of five found it easier to believe in some superhuman properties than to understand similar human limitations.
Monday, 7th March 2011
Religious people ‘still calling the shots’
Legislators have to use their own conscience but go beyond what they think and factor in the common good, according to Roger Trigg, a leading academic at Kellogg College, Oxford.
Europe is becoming more aggressively secular but Malta – as evidenced by the hot issue of divorce – is still actively religious, according to a British philosopher.
“In Malta religious people are still calling the shots”, Roger Trigg, Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Kellogg College, Oxford, said.
He cited letters to The Times, where readers made their case on divorce in quite “extreme” tones, ranging from quoting Jesus to urging MPs to vote according to their religious beliefs. Prof Trigg said that ideally legislators in Malta need to find a middle way.
“Legislators have to use their own conscience but go beyond what they think and factor in the common good when taking their decision“, Prof Trigg said.
He was recently in Malta to give a lecture on the theme “Free to Believe? A Religious Conscience in a Secular Society” organised by DISCERN – the Church’s Institute for Research on the Signs of the Times.
Malta’s divorce issue was not the central topic of Prof Trigg’s lecture. His address focused on Europe’s aggressive secularism and how untypical it was to the rest of the world. In Africa, Latin America and even the affluent US, religion is not opposed. Malta is the only exception in Western Europe but Prof Trigg said he believed, “the winds of change will be reaching the shores of Malta inevitably – sooner rather than later”.
He argued that the Council of Europe sees human rights as in opposition to religion, rather than being underwritten by it. “Not only must religious viewpoints not be given any privileged position, those view points are not even respected”. Courts were being involved in matters beyond their competence: “This is resulting in courts deciding that wearing a cross is not required by religious belief, but wearing a Sikh bangle on a Muslim headscarf is”, he said.
He referred to the case of a civil registrar in London who lost a legal battle against her sacking after she refused to register same sex partnerships on the basis of her Christian beliefs.
“The English Court of Appeal put issues of human rights and equality above any idea of freedom of religion. The Court even asserted that beliefs about marriage were not a ‘core part’ of the registrar’s religion, illuminating a dangerous tendency to get drawn into theological stances”.
The Republic of Ireland in 2010 took it a step further and brought in legislation to allow civil partnerships between same sex couples, and even threatened criminal proceedings against registrars unwilling to register them: “There is no attempt to provide for ‘reasonable accommodation’ for the religious conscience”, he said.
European law considers that you do not have to do a particular job, and must give it up if it offends your conscience: “Yet the freedom to be unemployed is not much of a freedom, is it?”.
He expressed his concern that religion in Europe is too often seen as a threat to be controlled, something we should be guarded from rather than something to be nourished: “What is developing is not neutrality but often hostility to religion, with an ideology of human rights taking its place”, he said.
He said that religion was increasingly being treated as a private and personal matter, thus rendering it powerless to influence or contribute to public discussion. “There are dangers in not allowing religion to take part in ‘public reason’, apart from its positive contributions being ignored... Christianity need not fear public debate, or doubt its ability to contribute to it”.
This fear probably stemmed from an aversion to “theocracy”, where religious views were imposed, freedom of religion not respected. “The irony is that in distrusting religious influence, Europe, through its laws and collective institutions, is challenging freedom of religion, not seeing it as one of the basic human rights, and itself closely linked to democracy”, he argued.
In Europe, government “neutrality” involved a distancing from religion, so that many European states were cutting themselves off from their Christian heritage. A case in point, he said, was the Treaty of Lisbon, with its considerable resistance to mentioning Christianity, merely referring to the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe”.
“This means that we are cut off from our history and deprived of the rational underpinning for our beliefs and rights”, said Prof Trigg. He argued that neutrality was an illusion: “You need to have some principles. In the end any state will be called in to take one position or another”.
Prof. Trigg said that the tendencies to religion were deeply rooted in human nature; atheism was not a human’s default option. “Religion is as important to us as the urge to drink to eat and sleep”. Thwarting, or ignoring, religion is to ignore an important component of human life, which, like it or not, is always going to be factor.
Prof Trigg concluded by quoting his four–year old grandson who recently informed him that “God knows everything”.
“When I asked him why he thought that, my grandson looked at me and said: ‘Because God is God’ ”.
E.S.P.R. Conference
The Centre was closely involved in the holding of the European Conference on the Philosophy of Religion, held in the new conference facilities at Merton College, Oxford from August 26th to 29th 2010. This was the latest in the series of biennial conferences held across Europe by the European Society for Philosophy of Religion, the first of which was also held in Oxford, in 1978. This year’s conference proceded under the guidance of Professor Roger Trigg, the current President of the European Society, and the 2012 Conference will be held at the University of Utrecht. The subject of the conference was ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’. The keynote address was given by Professor Nicholas Wolterstorff of Yale, one of the United States’ leading philosophers, who has written influentially on the subject of religion in public life. There were one hundred participants from over twenty countries. One feature was the attendance of scholars from Eastern Europe, and also younger researchers. Both groups had been helped by bursaries given through the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation. The sessions, including one on religious freedom, were stimulating, and the contributions of a high standard. A beautiful concert in Merton College Chapel gave welcome diversion on the last evening, and all agreed that it had been a most successful conference.
Roger Trigg to: Free to believe? - report on religious freedom.
Listen to Prof Roger Trigg's interview - Religion in the Public Square.
Membership of the Executive Committee:
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Professor Roger Trigg - Academic Director |
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Dr Robin Gibbons - Administrative Director |
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Canon Vincent Strudwick
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Dr Basil Mustafa
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Ms Jitka Fort - Director of Development |
Contact details:
Dr Robin Gibbons robin.gibbons@kellogg.ox.ac.uk
Jitka Fort jitka.fort@kellogg.ox.ac.uk