Controversy as a lens on change

Conflicts and controversies over religion offer a useful lens on wider developments in the post-war period. This chapter charts the development of such controversies over time, showing how they have intensified in recent decades, and analyzing them by considering their changing nature and the issues and parties involved. It shows that ‘cults’ or ‘New Religious Movements’ were the focus of public controversies in the 1960s and 1970s, but that from the 1980s, especially with the Rushdie Affair, attention shifted to Islam, issues of free speech, the question of how far religion could be publically manifest, and what privileges and exemptions it could claim. Terrorism associated with religion, both Irish nationalist and Islamist, endures as a public and political concern. The chapter sets this in broader context, showing how in a society which is now Christian, secular and religiously plural the place and ‘rights’ of religion become complex and contested. Although there is a tendency to see religious conflict as something new, the chapter also mentions earlier historical examples – like the Gunpowder Plot – to show that violent conflict is hardly novel in British history. As in the Introduction and Chapter Twelve, it is noted that the tendency to see religion as uniquely violent – and to ignore the more common non-religious forms of violence, whether domestic/gender-based or political – is itself a viewpoint which grows out of secular-religious conflict.