TayoBlog

The text of my presentation at UCT on 13 October 2008

The question being debated should begin with a brief reflection on the present state of religious accommodation at UCT. And I propose that the answer to the question is actually ‘yes’ in at least one way.

Let me point to the most obvious. UCT’s major hol(y)days fall in line with key Christian sacred days. We may also think of sabbaticals deriving from Judeo-Christian roots. Their meaning are steeped in particular understandings of God, creation, work and rest.

You might rightly say that these practices have been secularized, just as our constitutional court did a few years ago in a case where a liquor company challenged the restriction of alcoholic sales on Sundays and other religious holy days. The religious meaning of Sunday, said honourable Albie Sachs, was “an insignificant relic of a vanishing era.” Secularization, we are to believe, has moved us a safe distance away from religion and should stay that way.

I submit, however, that I have never heard a proposal to use Sundays or God forbid, Christmas, to address the tight examination or even regular course time-table problems at UCT. I also have never heard of rethinking sabbaticals due to their religious roots.

Secularization, I believe, takes its shape around and through religion. More particularly, it takes shape around a particular religious tradition(s). The holidays and sabbaticals of UCT are a very clear example of that shaping. To illustrate this point, allow me to ask you to imagine a different context for UCT.

Imagine the call to  Friday reverberating through the campus on Fridays and all of the lectures and administration offices going into recess just as if it was a Sunday or Christmas Day. The performance of such weekly occurrences would, I suspect, be quite disconcerting and even disorienting to many. Such a disorientation highlights how devout non-Christians may feel about the work of secular UCT around the symbols of Christianity and not their own religious traditions.

And I submit that the recent request from student bodies to accommodate Friday prayers and Jewish Sabbath is just that: A demand that the accommodation between Christianity and a secular institution be enlarged to include other religious traditions as well.

The request that gave rise to this debate was spurred by a very clear sense of marginalization and exclusion felt and perceived by religious groups, particularly those not presently accommodated in the secular shape of UCT. I use the words ‘felt’ and  ‘perceive’ carefully, because this one-sidedness is not entirely true. Individual departments and lecturers at UCT regularly accommodate religious practices in a variety of ways. And UCT has a multi-faith religious centre for students that manifests this accommodation.

And yet, there continues to be these relics and remnants (to use Sack’s term) that reflect an accommodation between secular UCT and Christianity on a grander scale. The accommodation between UCT and Christianity is natural and normal, and hardly receives a second look. It is a privilege that presently stands beyond Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and African Traditional Religions.

The present question about the secular nature of UCT has been raised on the formal and symbolic levels. Fundamentally, that question must not be forgotten.

However, we could use the opportunity to probe a bid deeper on the relationship between the secular and the religious. We should go beyond the question of accommodation, and ask how the religious and the secular relate to each other. With the re-emergence of the religious in the public sphere across the globe, what does the secular and religious mean for UCT?

I suspect that there are some who would like to reinforce the secular nature of the University, and keep a watchful eye over any religious claim made in both symbolic and substantial form. Clearly, Dawkins leads the pack here and elsewhere.

On the other hand, religious groups are riding a popular wave of discontent towards what they claim is the secular. They remind us daily about the failures of secular policies, secular politics and these last few days even secular markets! With the failure of every secular claim or institution, they are ready to put forward new utopias for the willing and the unwilling faithful.

Both these groups fail to recognize the mutual dependence of the secular and the religious in the modern world. The definition of the secular has been dependent on the (re)definition of the religious. Like black and white, positive and negative, the religious and the secular are defined by mutual exclusion and mutual transformation: the one is material and the other spiritual; the one this-worldly whilst the other other-worldly; the one rational whilst the other irrational; the one calculating whilst the other emotional and passionate. One cannot have the secular without the religious, and vice versa particularly in the modern context.

The role of UCT should be directed at promoting a critical approach and attitude to this continuous mutual construction, sometimes a dance in step and at other a dance out of step.

Too often, the secular has been transformed from a pragmatic tool and approach to knowledge and institution formation, into an ideological programme to enforce a particular vision and public policy on a society. The secular has been a central component of modernization and colonization, against indigenous and local forms of knowledge and institutions.

At the same time, the religious in the modern world has been shaped in reaction to the secular. Often deliberately taking a role against the secular, the religious has been rigid, intractable and authoritarian. It does not open itself to critical examination and self-reflexivity, taking refuge in being irrational, sacred and rigid in all its dimensions. In many ways, in a clear twist of irony, it has taken the form that the secular prophets claimed it was.

A critical stance to the secular and the religious is a difficult position to take. A University that takes pride in its history and its leadership role in the production of knowledge and critical engagement in the present, cannot afford anything more or less.