The Sociology of Religion

A Modest Social Constructionist View

James A. Beckford
University of Warwick

The following is an essay prepared in anticipation of a keynote address at the

annual conference of the Japanese Association for Religious Studies (jars)
to be held at Soka University in September 2015. A Japanese translation is
also available in this year’s Nanzan Institute Japanese-language Bulletin
(Shohō 所報).

T
his paper has two main objectives. The first is to characterise my
particular way of raising sociological questions about religion. The
second objective is to explain how my sociological research can make
a contribution to broader studies of religion. The reason for giving so
much attention to my own ideas and publications is to give Japanese scholars
an opportunity to consider the extent to which their own work is either aligned
with my approach or incompatible with it. In this sense, my intention is to facili-
tate a debate and an exchange of ideas about the contributions that at least one
kind of sociology can make to the understanding of religion.
Let me quickly add an apology for focusing so much of this paper on my own
research. The reason for choosing such a narrow focus is not that my work is any
kind of model for others to follow. On the contrary, I would like to invite readers
to react critically to my ideas so that a debate can take place. I am offering my
work as focus for discussion and as a “target” for criticism in the hope that this
will help to make debate easier than it would be if the focus was on the sociology
of religion in general.

Sociological approaches to the study of “religion”

Two of my publications contain statements of my general approach to studying
religion from a sociological point of view. One is the introductory section of
my book Social Theory and Religion (Beckford 2003); the other is an autobio-
graphical account of my career that appeared in an edited volume on Studying

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 the sociology of religion

Religion in Society (Beckford 2013a). Incidentally, other chapters in the latter

volume are relevant to this paper because they illustrate some of the variety of
approaches that sociologists in Western countries take to the study of religion.1
In their different ways, all these different approaches take the social dimen-
sions of religion as their object of study. But what does this mean? Among other
things, it means that religion can be understood, in part, as an aspect of the
social life of many—but not all—human societies. In other words, religion can
be studied as a feature of such basic social processes as socialisation, interaction,
communication, organisation, regulation, and so on. Sociological studies also
examine religion in relation to factors that shape the life-course and life chances
such as social class and status, ethnicity, nationality, gender, political and moral
values, age, and generation. Another important area for sociological studies of
religion is the social patterning of worship and beliefs, religious organisations,
religious professional roles, and the involvement of religious groups in social
welfare, civic activities and social movement campaigns. Most famously, per-
haps, the topic of religion features in theories about high-level processes of social
change such as industrialisation, urbanisation, rationalisation, secularisation,
globalisation, and so on. But perhaps the most ambitious project of some soci-
ologists of religion has been to devise theories of religion which give sociologi-
cal reasons for the very phenomenon of religion (Stark and Bainbridge 1987;
Benthall 2008; Riesebrodt 2010; Pace 2011). Finally, it needs to be empha-
sised that exploration of all these aspects of religion as a social phenomenon is
likely to be most successful when it is conducted with sensitivity to historical,
geographical and cultural contexts.
At the same time, a rich diversity of research methods can be employed
to gather and analyse information about the social aspects of religion. They
include, for example, surveys of beliefs and opinions, analysis of demographic
trends and official statistics, interviews, ethnography, participant observation,
focus groups, analysis of social, broadcast and print media, discourse analysis,
and interpretation of visual images.

A social constructionist approach

I characterise my approach to studying religion sociologically as “modest” social
constructionism (Beckford 2003, 3). Let me try to be clear about my use of
the term “social constructionism,” which is commonly used by social scientists
and students of culture, albeit in widely differing ways (Velody and Williams
1998). In the most radical sense of the term, social constructionism holds that

1. For mainly Western overviews of the scope of the sociology of religion, see Dillon 2003; Beck-
ford and Demerath 2007; and Clarke 2009.

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 james a. beckford

social reality consists of nothing but text and discourse. This is the “universal”
form of constructionism that the philosopher John Searle (1995) dismisses for
good reason. According to this radical view, there can be nothing more real or
accessible than language use and discursive practice (Gergen 1999). Against
this radical view, my more modest use of “constructionism” means only that
human beings construct, communicate, and negotiate shared meanings in the
course of their social interactions with each other. For example, public order,
disorder, panics, and confidence all emerge as the products of countless human
interactions. Similarly, my main interest is in the social processes whereby the
meaning of “religion” is continuously being intuited, asserted, doubted, chal-
lenged, rejected, substituted, re-cast, and so on, in social contexts.
Let me add that I am far from being alone in thinking of the category of
religion as a social construction. To take just one example, Peter Beyer (2003,
158) argues that scientific, theological and “official” conceptions of religion vary
with “the social structures in which they take place.” His approach is rooted in
the sociology of knowledge which, in turn, can trace its origins back through the
work of Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger to that of the phenomenological
philosophy of Alfred Schutz.
The meaning that I give to “social construction” is not rooted in any particu-
lar assumptions about ontology (“what there is”) or epistemology (“what can
be known”). It is merely part of an analytical strategy that I use for investigat-
ing aspects of religion from a sociological point of view. Indirectly, my strategy
also asks how the category of “non-religion” is socially constructed. There is
no assumption on my part that the category of either religion or non-religion
is any more natural, given or unproblematic than the other. In fact the shifting
boundary between the categories of religion and non-religion in various types
of discourse is particularly interesting to me. I want to know how the boundary
is staked out, defended, deployed, attacked, concealed, blurred, re-defined or
even dissolved.
It should become clear that my choice of the word “construction” does not
necessarily imply “invention” in the sense in which Jason Ānanda Josephson’s
(2012) book accounts for The Invention of Religion in Japan. His inquiry into the
history of Japanese attempts in the mid-nineteenth century to find a term that
adequately covered Japanese traditions as well as Christianity and Buddhism
stresses the need to find a new term for a completely new set of phenomena.
But what I have in mind are the less dramatic processes whereby the ostensibly
well-known and widely understood phenomenon of religion in western soci-
eties nevertheless remains the object of frequent contention about definition,
meaning and interpretation. This is what I mean by “construction.” It signifies
a process of putting components together. This is different from discovering,
manufacturing (McCutcheon 1997), imagining (Smith 1982) or inventing

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 the sociology of religion

(Peterson and Walhof 2003; Masuzawa 2005) religion. It brings connota-

tions of “fashioning,” “shaping,” and “patterning.” There is also the important
implication that these constructions can be deconstructed or reconstructed. My
involvement in sociological research has no interest in trying to determine the
essence—or a definitive definition—of religion.
My modest social constructionist approach makes no assumptions about
the reality or otherwise of the transcendent, the sacred, the divine, the infinite,
the “finally final,” or ultimate reality. I accept that some human beings have
experiences of communicating with the transcendent. I also accept that these
experiences may be the inspiration for love, charity, selflessness, sublime artis-
tic achievements, virtue, feelings of awe and so on. But at the same time it is
also clear to me that these experiences and the benefits imputed to them are
symbolized and conveyed in social and cultural forms which display patterns.
These patterns are shaped by all manner of influences that arise from such
sources as faith traditions, high culture, popular culture, ideologies, and politi-
cal events. And, in turn, these expressions of experiences with the transcendent
are capable of exercising their own influence on social and cultural life. All of
these processes are eminently social and therefore of interest to the sociology of
religion—whatever else they may be.
Another key characteristic of my modest social constructionism is its delib-
erately partial and one-sided perspective on religion. It seeks primarily to throw
light on the uses that can be made of religion in various social contexts—and
on the controversies and conflicts that arise. Questions about the recognition
and regulation of what counts as religion are also on the social construction-
ist agenda, as I shall show in the next section of this paper. But my approach
makes no claim to replace, or even to enhance, other conceptions of religion. It
merely offers a distinctive conceptual angle from which to understand the wide
diversity of ways in which constructions of religion are employed in social and
cultural life.
The last point that I want to make about the continuing saga of attempts to
produce a universally effective and acceptable definition of religion is that a
form of “metaphysical pathos” (Gouldner 1955) seems to haunt them. It is as
if there is something unique—and uniquely troubling—about the difficulty of
conceptualising or defining religion. But in my view religion is no different in
this respect from other categories such as education, culture, art and sport. None
of these institutions enjoys a universally satisfactory or agreed definition. These
categories are all “contested” in social life as well as in scholarly discussion. It is
a mistake, therefore, to think that our scholarship must be defective if we cannot
resolve definitional problems about religion once and for all.

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 james a. beckford

Social constructionism in relation to

new religious movements and religion in prisons
This section of the paper provides some examples from two of my areas of
research in which social constructionist ideas have played an important role.
(a) The first example is about new religious movements. At the time of my
first visit to Japan in 1978 I was actively engaged in research on new religious
movements (nrms), and I maintain my interest in them mainly through involve-
ment in the work of Inform—a research centre and network created in 1988 by
Professor Eileen Barker for the purpose of collecting, assessing and disseminat-
ing objective information about nrms and minority religions.2
A recurring aspect of my work on nrms has been the portrayal of them
in the mass media—and the uses that the opponents of nrms have made of
these portrayals (Beckford and Cole 1988; Beckford 1995). The focus of
my analysis was partly on the social processes through which notions such as
“cult,” “destructive cult,” and “brainwashing” were not only constructed but
also amplified and transmitted across different social groups and networks in
various countries (Beckford 1983b). But this also entailed investigation of
the “anti-cult” groups which used popular, stereotyped portrayals of nrms in
their campaigns to denigrate the movements and to invoke legal and political
regulation of them. In short, it was the social construction of what I called “cult
controversies” which lay at the centre of my research in the 1970s and 1980s
(Beckford 1985).
In addition, I have repeatedly looked for ways of making comparisons
between different countries in terms of their attempts to “frame” and control
these controversies (Beckford 1983b, 1993, 1998a). The case of “cult contro-
versies” in France has long held a particularly strong interest for me, especially
because this staunchly secular Republic has invested so many resources in offi-
cial programmes and laws to control what it calls “les dérives sectaires” (cultic
aberrations) (Beckford 2004). More recently, I tried to identify the sociologi-
cal features of religious controversies in more general terms but again with the
emphasis on their socially constructed character (Beckford and Marmusz-
tejn 2010).
In short, the focus of my approach to understanding nrms has mainly been
on the controversies that surround them. At the heart of these controversies are
struggles over the power to frame the movements as harmful in various ways,
to construct them as social problems, and to impose controls on their activities.

See http://www.inform.ac/ See also the Ashgate/Inform series of edited books on Minority Reli-
2.

gions and Spiritual Movements: http://www.ashgatepublishing.com/default.aspx?page=5097&series_

id=533&calcTitle=1.

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 the sociology of religion

In turn, the movements mobilise campaigns of resistance which seek to chal-

lenge their controversial image and to claim protection under treaties and laws
that guarantee the freedom of religion—and the equality of religions in some
countries. The power to enforce definitions and interpretive frames is under the
spotlight of my kind of social constructionism.
In addition, I have employed a social constructionist approach to studies of
individual members—and ex-members—of religious movements. This involved
analysing the accounts that these individuals gave of their conversion and/or
de-conversion. Using insights from ethnomethodology, I tried to identify the
distinctiveness of the “conversion accounts” given by British converts to the
Watch Tower movement of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Beckford 1975, 1978a) and
of the de-conversion accounts given by former members of the Unificationist
movement (Beckford 1978b, 1983a). Both cases involved the social construc-
tion of accounts that were “rational” in the sense of offering explanations that
were intended to be considered competent and plausible by the people at whom
the accounts were aimed. Equally, the accounts that opponents and critics gave
of conversion to, and de-conversion from, these two religious movements in
terms of, for example, brainwashing, mind control and de-programming were
artfully constructed to display their own rationality (Beckford 1985, 190–217).
(b) The second example of social constructionism in my work concerns
religion in prisons. In fact, the focus of most of my research since 1994 has been
on the provision of religious and spiritual care to prisoners in countries such as
England & Wales, France and Canada (Beckford and Gilliat 1998; Beckford,
Joly and Khosrokhavar 2005; Beckford 2013b; Beckford and Cairns 2015).
From my point of view, the category of religion is not simply a philosophical
abstraction. It undoubtedly can be an abstraction; but in the eyes of a sociolo-
gist it also amounts to an empirically observable feature of many social settings.
And nowhere are the implications of religion, as a category, more visible than
in prisons and other institutions housing people who are removed to varying
degrees from the rest of society. Residential schools, hospitals (Gilliat 2001;
Cadge 2012; Gilliat, Ali, and Pattison 2013) and military establishments
(Gutkowski and Wilkes 2011; Hansen 2012) are also among the other social
settings where religion is “made visible” and recognised as such in the terms set
by each institution. In other words, what counts as religion, both in general and
in particular, is a social construction which arises in part from a wide range of
processes as diverse as legislation, litigation, accommodation and concession.
These processes contribute towards the reification of religion.
Prisons are prime sites of reified knowledge about religion (Beckford 2012).
By this, I mean that prisons are places where the abstract category of religion is
translated into specific things which are either permitted or prohibited depend-
ing on whether they conform to an official model of “real” religion. For example,

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 james a. beckford

the Prison Service of England & Wales3 determines that prisoners who identify
themselves as practitioners of Pagan traditions are to be regarded as having a
religion and are permitted to keep the following artefacts in their cell:
• Incense and holder (Lavender and Frankincense are most common)
• A religious piece of jewellery (e.g. pentagram necklace or ring)
• Hoodless Robe (only to be used during private or corporate worship)
• Flexible twig for wand
• Rune stones (wood, stone or clay tablets with the symbols of the Norse-German
alphabet) and bag or box to carry them
• Chalice (cup)
In addition,
Some Pagans use Tarot Cards for meditation and guidance. This may
be allowed under the supervision of the Pagan Chaplain. If a prisoner
requests to be allowed to retain a part or full pack in possession, this
may be allowed, but only following a local Risk Assessment to deter-
mine whether there is any reason to preclude cards being kept in pos-
session. The cards are for personal use only and may be withdrawn if
used inappropriately (e.g. telling fortunes).
(Ministry of Justice 2011, 73)
It is important to note how the intervention of a chaplain and, in some circum-
stances, the conduct of a risk assessment are required before Tarot Cards can be
used legitimately. The permissibility of this particular practice has to be negoti-
ated—and may be denied. This example is nothing more than a trivial indica-
tion of the extent to which aspects of religion are reified as either permitted or
prohibited practices and objects in the setting of prisons in England & Wales.
This means that prison authorities—usually in consultation with chaplains and
leading representatives of “faith traditions”—select and apply their own indica-
tors of what is considered normal in the practice of any particular religion. I
think of this as a “recipe” for each religion. And the combined “book” of recipes
for all permitted religions is the Prison Service Instruction number 51 “Faith and
pastoral care for prisoners” (Ministry of Justice 2011).
In “total institutions” such as prisons, there is pressure to define and regulate
virtually all activities. And activities categorised as religious are no exception.
This is why the reification of religion takes such elaborate and finely grained
forms. Nothing can be left to chance; ambiguities are kept to a minimum; and

3. See https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-prison-service. England and Wales, two

of the four components of the United Kingdom, share the same prison service, but Scotland and North-
ern Ireland have separate prison systems.

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 the sociology of religion

procedures are in place for monitoring compliance with the permitted formats
for religious activities. Some prisoners test the limits of permitted religious
activities—with or without the support of interest groups outside prison. At the
same time, the very existence of detailed “recipes” for the practice of faith tradi-
tions gives rise to negotiation and contention about comparisons and analogies
between them.
In short, my social constructionist approach has shown that prisons in
England and Wales translate the general category of religion into objective
statements about the components of the particular religions that prisoners are
permitted to practice. The “recipes” for the practice of each religion are social
constructions which reify religious traditions in terms of various patterns: min-
istry, corporate worship, private worship, festivals, beliefs, theology, diet, dress,
toiletries, work, artefacts, marriage, funerals and groupings within the tradition.
These recipes are also authoritative in so far as they are the products of negotia-
tions between Prison Service officials and appointed members of the national
Chaplaincy Council and its associated list of Faith Advisers. The Faith Advisers,
who are representatives of selected faith traditions, have become touchstones for
the authenticity of the religious practices permitted to prisoners, although they
cannot possibly represent all the different strands, movements or tendencies
within their own faith traditions. Nevertheless, the authority that they exer-
cise also contributes towards the reification of religion because they accept the
reduction of their diverse faith traditions to the dimensions of supposedly core
obligations or requirements.
These recipes produce real effects in the lives of prisoners and prison staff
alike. Most notably, recipes for religions shape the ways in which prisons are
built (to include chapels or multi-faith spaces for worship), staff are employed
(as chaplains), volunteers are engaged (to assist chaplains), training is delivered
(to sensitise staff to patterns of religious obligations), time is allocated (for reli-
gious programming and religious festivals), diets are accommodated (to suit
religious requirements), arrangements can be made (in the event of serious
illness or death among prisoners and/or their close relatives), and resources are
distributed (in support of religious practices).
Recipes for the practice of religions that are permitted in prisons are social
constructions—but so what? How can that be of any interest? My answer is in
two parts. The first is that prisons in England and Wales, as public institutions,
are governed not only by the Prison Act 1952 and other secondary legislation
but also by the Equality Act 2010. This means that it is illegal to discriminate
against prisoners (or other citizens) on the grounds of nine “protected char-
acteristics,” one of which is “religion or belief.” Not surprisingly, some of the
disputes that arise in prisons centre on claims that certain religions or religious
practices are unfairly discriminated against. These claims have multiplied as the

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 james a. beckford

religious diversity of the prison population has increased (Beckford 2013b).

The question of how “religion or belief ” is interpreted and implemented in the
everyday life of prisons is at the heart of claims to equality and grievances about
inequality. A social constructionist approach is indispensable, therefore, to any
investigation of how disputes about religion arise in prisons and how these dis-
putes are managed.
The second part of my answer is that some prisoners try to take advantage
of their circumstances; and some of them are litigious. So, if religious activity
enjoys protection and privilege, why not try to create or adapt a religion in order
to take advantage? The best known case is that of the Church of the New Song
(cons4), a prison gang that spread through federal and state penitentiaries in the
US beginning in the 1970s. It had some elaborate beliefs and practices, including
the “religious obligation” to hold a weekly “celebration of life” banquet including
sherry wine and beefsteak. It took a succession of American courts thirty years
finally to put a stop to cons, albeit on the technical grounds of inconsistencies in
the so-called church’s teachings. Questions about how religion is constructed lie
at the heart of this case—and are implicitly questions about who has the power
to enforce their constructions in particular circumstances. The link between
social constructionism and power in the context of religion has a long history
(Beckford 1983c).
Furthermore, comparisons between the prison systems of different countries
are of special interest to me because they reveal not only variations in how
religion can be constructed but also the different forms that its “management”
in prisons can take (Becci 2011; Furseth and Kühle 2011; Becci and Knobel
2013). In the space available here I can only sketch some of the findings from my
own comparative studies of religion in the prison systems of England & Wales
and France (Beckford and Gilliat 1998; Beckford, Joly and Khosrokhavar
2005). The emphasis is on the different frameworks that regulate the recognition
of permissible religion—another aspect of social construction.

(i) England and Wales

The Prison Act 1952 requires all prisons to have a chaplain from the Church
of England and such other ministers of religion as the Secretary of State may
consider necessary. Governors are legally required to record the “religious
denomination” of all prisoners at the point of reception and to inform the rel-
evant chaplain. Other regulations specify that the Prison Service “recognises
and respects the right of prisoners to register and practise their faith whilst in
custody” (Ministry of Justice 2011, 1). This is recognition of individual pris-
oners’ rights, although much of the regulatory framework is actually concerned

4. This acronym is an ironic pun on the English language abbreviation for the word “convicts.”

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 the sociology of religion

with the collective activities of religious groups, chaplains and representatives

of selected faith traditions. In fact, the framework is principally about “religious
provision” or the corporate responsibility for facilitating the personal and col-
lective practice of religions. This explains why the “Performance Standard 51.
Religion”— by which the quality of each prison’s arrangements for religion is
regularly assessed—stipulates that all establishments should “enable prisoners
to participate in corporate worship and other religious activities that encourage
their spiritual and personal development whilst in custody, and in preparation
for release into the community” (Ministry of Justice 2006). The “required
outcomes” relate to such things as the appointment of chaplains, the accurate
conduct of “religious registration,” opportunities for corporate worship and the
provision of pastoral care. The emphasis is heavily on the official requirement
to make these provisions rather than on the rights and freedoms of individual
prisoners simply to practice their faith. In this way, religion is constructed, in
part, as a collective property of prison establishments and their regimes in Eng-
land and Wales.
Another aspect of the social construction of religion in the prisons of Eng-
land and Wales can be seen in the policy and practice of selecting only certain
religious traditions for inclusion in the list of “faith specific provision.” This
selectivity also applies to the range of religious traditions from which chaplains
may be appointed on the advice of the Prison Service Chaplaincy’s panel of
Faith Advisers. In 2013, the traditions of Quakerism and Rastafari were added
to the list, but Scientology and the Nation of Islam remain excluded. Moreover,
chaplains are expected to “work as an inclusive team and meet together on a
regular basis” (Ministry of Justice 2011, 5), thereby reinforcing the impres-
sion that the provision of religious and pastoral care in the prisons of England
& Wales is less to do with the individual rights of prisoners than it is to do with
the integration of approved religious practices and personnel into the corporate
life of prisons.

(ii) France
The French Prison Service, l’Administration pénitentiaire, is bound by the consti-
tutional stipulation that France should be a unitary and secular (laïc) Republic
that is separate from, and neutral towards, all religions. The 2009 law on prisons
also specifies that “inmates have the right to freedom of opinion, conscience
and religion. They can practice the religion of their choice in accordance with
the conditions prevailing in their establishment, without any restrictions other
than those imposed by the security and good order of the establishment.”5 In

5. Loi n° 2009-1436 du 24 novembre 2009 pénitentiaire: 1.

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 james a. beckford

addition, the consolidated Code de procédure pénale of June 20116 guarantees to

inmates various other rights, for example, to confidential correspondence with
chaplains and the opportunity for meetings with them on request “as often as
necessary” (Article R57-9-6).
However, the first point to make is that these rights are interpreted as appli-
cable mainly to what individual prisoners are permitted to do and to keep in
the privacy of their cells. For example, it is permissible for prisoners to wear
conspicuous symbols of their religious identity in their cells but not in the public
areas of prisons. Religious clothing, sacred texts and religious artefacts must be
placed in a bag if they are to be carried between cells and worship spaces. But
prisoners’ rights to collective worship are not always honored—except for the
services provided, often by local priests and volunteers (one third of whom are
women), for the benefit of Catholics. The relative privileges enjoyed by Catholic
prisoners are often justified on the grounds that they represent tradition or cul-
ture rather than religion; and this supposedly helps to avoid breaching the prin-
ciple of laïcité. Jean Baubérot’s (2008) term for this is “catho-laïcité.” In itself, this
is an interesting example of a discourse that constructs religion as something
essentially private that also happens to be part of “traditional” French culture.
Second, and as a consequence of laïcité’s insistence that the French Republic
cannot officially take religious or ethnic identity into account, there is no pro-
cedure for recording the religious identity of prisoners. There are no official sta-
tistics relating to religion in prisons or in any other institutions of the Republic.
This means that religion is reified mainly as something that individuals should be
free to cultivate in private if they wish (within the limits of the law). The respon-
sibility of French prisons is principally to ensure that this individual right is not
unfairly obstructed. Although the law also specifies that every prisoner should
be able to participate in collective worship under the supervision of chaplaincy
staff, responsibility for this is effectively devolved to a relatively small number of
chaplains and a much larger number of volunteers from religious organizations,
with a minimum of official co-ordination at regional and national levels of the
prison system. Nevertheless, laïcité has “variable geometry” (Béraud, Galem-
bert, and Rostaing 2013) and can therefore be moulded to different shapes in
different settings. In Véronique Altglas’s (2010) words “laïcité is what laïcité
does”—and it apparently operates differently in state schools, hospitals, prisons
and the armed services.
A third aspect of the way in which religion is socially constructed in French
prisons is the suspicion that religion, except in the confines of the private sphere,
may represent a threat of “communitarianism.” Collective expressions of strong

6. See http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006071154&dateTexte
=20110624. Last accessed 25 February 2015.

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 the sociology of religion

religious identity are suspected of having the dangerous capacity to short-circuit

the unmediated relationship between citizens and the State by creating an alter-
native focus for political identity and loyalty. As such, communitarian forms of
religion allegedly pose a threat to security and good order in prisons and else-
where. This suspicious attitude towards forms of religion that have communal
dimensions, especially those with explicitly political implications, is congruent
with the French Republic’s long-running campaigns of opposition towards con-
troversial religious movements (Beckford 2004; Palmer 2008, 2011). Not sur-
prisingly, the combination of communalism, controversial religious movements
and prisons evokes particularly harsh responses. For example, the Administration
pénitentiaire has repeatedly refused to allow Jehovah’s Witnesses to visit prisons
for religious purposes—in spite of the fact that more than a dozen courts, includ-
ing the Administrative Appeal Court of Paris in June 20117 and the Conseil d’État
on 16 October 2013,8 have penalised various public authorities for their failure
to recognise that Witnesses should be permitted to enter prisons as chaplains.
To summarise these comparisons, then, the prisons of England and Wales tend
to construct religion as a legally required aspect of their corporate life. Full-time,
part-time and volunteer chaplains are an integral part of this system, and there is
formal commitment to the principle that permissible religions and beliefs enjoy
equality. Grievances centre on allegations that some religions are excluded from
prisons and that the principle of equality for all religions or beliefs is not always
respected in practice. In comparison, French prisons tend to construct religion
as a private matter for individual prisoners. The provision of resources for collec-
tive religious activities, including the employment of chaplains, remains uneven
and weak; and chaplains play a very small role in the corporate life of prisons.
Ironically, however, the differences between the prisons of England and Wales
and France in relation to their respective ways of constructing and regulating
religion have no clear implications for combating the so-called radicalisation of
Muslim prisoners. There is widespread concern in the uk as well as in France
about links between imprisonment and the socialisation of Muslim prisoners
into violent, Islamist extremism. Yet, neither the provision of many carefully
trained and selected Muslim chaplains in the prisons of England & Wales nor
the French strategy of regarding the practice of Islam as mainly a matter for
individuals or voluntary groups seems to be entirely successful. Prison authori-
ties in both jurisdictions are struggling to respond adequately to their dispro-
portionately large and growing populations of Muslim inmates, including those

7. See http://www.lextimes.fr/4.aspx?sr=5063 Last accessed 2 March 2015.

8. See http://www.conseil-etat.fr/Decisions-Avis-Publications/Decisions/Selection-des-decisions
-faisant-l-objet-d-une-communication-particuliere/CE-16-octobre-2013-Garde-des-Sceaux-ministre
-de-la-justice-et-des-libertes-c-m.-n-et-autres. Last accessed 2 March 2015.

Bulletin 39 (2015) 20 Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture

 james a. beckford

with sympathies for violent extremism.9 The policy discourses about the appro-
priate way for public authorities such as prison services to respond to the threats
posed by “violent Islamism” are ripe for analysis in social constructionist terms.
Indeed, I argued long ago that British and French debates about social solidar-
ity in the 1980s and 1990s lent themselves to an examination of “the ideological
battles for control over what is to count as social solidarity” and, in particular,
of “the place of religion as an ideological resource in those battles” (Beckford
1998b, 154). Similar battles rage today about what counts as “social cohesion,”
“pluralism” (Beckford 2014) and a “multi-faith society.”

Conclusion
Sociological studies of religion can be based on a wide variety of theoretical
ideas, but this paper has deliberately highlighted only research conducted from
a modest social constructionist position. And, although critics have tried to
dismiss social constructionism as a post-modern perversion of truth or as an
expression of insidious relativism, I believe that it forms an indispensable part
of the sociological toolkit. This is why my aim in this paper has been to show
how a social constructionist perspective can help—sometimes in conjunction
with other perspectives—to reveal the processes whereby the meanings attrib-
uted to “religion” are negotiated in the course of social interaction. I have drawn
examples from my own work to show how these processes of negotiation take
place at the level of individual “conversion accounts,” mass media portrayals of
controversial religious movements, and discourses deployed in policy docu-
ments, regulations and daily regimes in prison systems.
“Negotiation” is a rather anaemic term, but I want to stress that it includes
not only positive interactions but also heated contestations and rejections of
socially constructed meanings. It is a process which plays out continuously in
contexts as diverse as courts of law, public policy discussions, debates about
Religious Education syllabuses, political polemics about “faith-based” welfare
programs, foreign policy doctrines in relation to religious freedom, and propos-
als for improving “religious literacy.” In all of these areas, the social construction
of religion is at work. I believe that my attempts to understand it can make some

9. Muslims in the uk amounted to roughly five per cent of the total population at the time of the
last national Census in 2011 but as many as fourteen per cent of the prison population of England and
Wales in June 2014, according to the Offender Management Caseload Statistics published by the Minis-
try of Justice. See https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-
april-to-june-2014. Population quarterly: Q3 2014. Table 1.5. Last accessed 25 February 2015. The French
prison service publishes no official statistics about the religious or ethnic identification of prisoners. For
estimates based on ethnographic research, see Khosrokhavar 2015.

Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture 21 Bulletin 39 (2015)

 the sociology of religion

necessary—albeit not sufficient—contributions to the wider enterprise of the

sociology of religion and to Religious Studies.

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