This panel explores the public manifestations of religion in various contexts, including civic organizations, public health science, and museums. The authors examine expressions and interpretations of religion across different global contexts and faith traditions. The first paper presents an ethnography of two American Muslim civic organizations that negotiate with Christian-centric cultural repertoires to express religion in public life. The second paper analyzes how members of Hindu temples in the U.S. navigate communal tensions to foster practical religious pluralism. The third paper examines how European and American museums categorize and display religion, revealing specific biases and definitions employed. Finally, the fourth paper explores the ways that public health scientists conceptualize religion as an institution, theology, and culture, and examines the stakes of these conceptualizations. Overall, these papers shed light on the diverse ways that religion is mobilized and understood in public contexts.
How do American Muslim advocates imagine the public role of religion in the U.S. today? Research on public religion in the U.S. has mostly focused on Christian groups. Empirically, this focus prevented researchers from asking the crucial question of how non-Christian religious groups adopt and adapt repertoires of public religious expressions circulating in U.S. civic culture. Theoretically, expanding our inquiry to non-dominant religious groups provides insights into the possibilities for imagining different modes of public religious expressions in U.S. civic life. What can non-dominant religious groups do to push the boundaries of Christian-infused modes of public religion? Through two years of participant observation in two Muslim advocacy organizations, I identified different styles of public Islam that American Muslim advocates use in U.S. civic life and theorize the filtering mechanisms that prevent certain expressions of public Islam to reach wider audiences, thus foregrounding the power imbalances that shape U.S. civic spaces.
How do American diasporas negotiate their faith, liberty, and public space in the face of both interreligious and intrareligious challenges? What kind of tensions and complexities arise, from inside and outside, when they opt for pluralistic approaches over confrontation and legal action? Addressing these questions at the intersection of civic space, religious pluralism, and public understanding of religion, this paper rethinks the category “public” in the context of religious diversity to argue that conflicts concerning religious publics can be solved by rising above the private-public, political-personal, secular-religious dichotomies in which public religion is usually understood. Drawing from the social scientific and ethnographic research conducted in the Swaminarayan-Hindu diasporic community in America that faced years-long resistance from native publics in constructing its temples and cultural centers, the paper further contends that self-reflective and constructive conversations with the self and co-religionists can help enhance public understanding of religion, thereby promoting harmonious coexistence.
Through categorization and display, museums identify some things as religious, some things as exemplary of religions, and in so doing, help shape the public's understanding of religion. By analyzing how museums have categorized and displayed religious objects, I argue the public encounters religion through specific biases and definitions of religion that museums employ in their attempts to exhibit material culture they believe to be "religious." Through the analysis and study of museums—like the Vatican Museums, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum, and the Brighton Museum—and the religious, scholars can investigate new ways of answering Laure Patton's question of "who owns religion," bolster Hugh Urban's claim that ordinary people help construct what counts as a religion, and shed new light on what Jonathan Z. Smith says counts as the academy in which he states religion has no place apart from.
Public health scientists often think about religion sociologically. Yet, many do not critically consider their assumptions and understandings of religion or cite scholars who define “religion.” This can lead public health scientists to draw on public assumptions of what “religion” is. Thus, I conducted a systematic analysis of scholarly work that included discussion of religion in the American Journal of Public Health to understand how religion is conceptualized among public health scientists. Three ways of understanding were most prominent: religion as institution, religion as theology, and religion as culture. Understanding religion as institution often led to seeing churches as resources; understanding religion as theology often led to seeing religion as negative beliefs to overcome; and religion as culture was often a stand-in for an ambiguous understanding of religion. This work urges sociologists of religion to examine the ways that public health scientists understand religion and reinforce biases within their scholarship.