New forms of spirituality and the threat of sects in the context of religious security

The presented article is an attempt to show the relationship between the emerging new forms of spirituality and the threat of sects. The authors analyze the contemporary cultural context in terms of widely understood spirituality. They then come to the conclusion that subjectivization of religion leads to destabilization of the religious life of a given community and gives rise to possibilities of abuse in the religious space. At the same time, the authors are aware of the urgent need to free religion from ossification, passivity, the feeling of siege, excessive institutionalisation. However, they want to draw attention to the dangers resulting from the simplification that is increasingly being heard, which can be formulated as follows: Let us move religion into the private sphere, and the problems of religious conflicts and abuses connected with spiritual life will end. The authors draw attention to the fact that the problem is much more complex and requires coordinated action on religious security.

Is the Body Secular? Circumcision, Religious Freedom, and Bodily Integrity

Recent legal and public debates over circumcision in Germany have tended to pit religious freedom against bodily integrity. This paper examines the background assumptions about religion and the body on which this framing depends. Insofar as the body is assumed to represent a fixed point determinable independently of ‘religion’, to frame the debate over circumcision in terms of a clash between rights pertaining respectively to religion and the body is, I argue, to circumscribe and contain religion within boundaries marked by the non-religious and non-negotiable. The secular body is thus not simply an additional consideration to be weighed against religious freedom but a condition of and limit to the modern conception of (free) religion itself. If the physical body is a synecdoche for the social system, the normative, uncircumcised body can be interpreted as standing in for the universalist order of secular law.

Religious Engagement

Since World War II, the promotion of American-friendly “free” religion abroad has been understood to benefit the rest of the world by saving it from religious and political tyranny. For decades, the United States has designed and sponsored religious reform projects to instruct religious individuals and groups abroad on how to be free, or at least freer, versions of themselves. This chapter explores the politics of US foreign religious engagement. It argues that while religious engagement does involve an attempt to strengthen US-friendly religious authorities and communities abroad, it is, at the same time, and more fundamentally, a project of religious reform, of transforming religions into what is understood to be better versions of themselves. It discusses three empirical focal points in the history of US foreign relations that illustrate this argument, beginning with American efforts to promote “global spiritual health” during the early Cold War.