Understanding the geographies of religion and secularity: on the potentials of a broader exchange between geography and the (post-) secularity debate

Abstract

For a long time, the mainstream of social and cultural geography seems to have implicitly accepted that religion is becoming obsolete and is of little social significance. However, since the 1990s, religion has aroused new interest in the social sciences in general, and to some extent also in social and cultural geography. Against this backdrop, a controversial discussion has started in geography on the relevance of theories of secularisation and the notion of post-secularity, as well as on possible contributions to these debates. The paper introduces the interdisciplinary debate on revisions of theories of secularisation and the promotion of post-secular perspectives, referring, among others, to Jürgen Habermas, Peter Berger, José Casanova, and Talal Asad. In a second step, we argue that an understanding of post-secularity that focuses on the contingency and context-dependent delimitation of the secular and the religious promises to be fruitful for social and cultural geography and can help us to understand the geographies of religion and secularity.