Nonreligious Actors and Their “Others” – How Questions of Justice Become Matters of Identity

Whether in a highly secular context, as in Sweden, or in countries where religion plays a more influential role in the public sphere: Nonreligious groups, like humanist or atheist organizations, often construe “religion” and/or religious actors as obstacles to social progress. In social conflicts and public debates, e.g. on education, gender equality, religious freedom etc., such processes of “othering” and the various imaginations of state, secularism, social justice and modernity intersect and manifest themselves in concrete ways. They thus provide an ideal framework for analysing the complex dynamics and multiple entanglements of (non)religion with questions of justice, equality, and ethics from a sociological perspective. In my paper I use the debate about religious education in Sweden as such an “entry point” for exploring those dynamics and relationships empirically in their cultural specific context. By looking at how humanists engage in such debates, at how they link ontological visions to normative orders, at how they position themselves in relation to religious actors – thereby navigating through the sometimes narrow path between mere advocacy for a secular state and social justice on the one hand and anti-religious criticism of faith communities on the other –, the socio-political dimension of being nonreligious becomes apparent – a dimension which so far has been hardly scrutinized by social scientists.