”Those boundaries are largely artificial”

”Things were starting to move” — that was the theme of Ulrich Schmiedel’s inaugural lecture at Lund University in September 2024, and it also became the theme of an issue of Uppdrag Mission. ”From your perspective, what do you see starting to move?” was the question that we asked some of Ulrich’s colleagues in different countries and some parish and diocese workers in the Church of Sweden. Ryszard Bobrowicz, visiting professor of Comparative Law and Religion at the Katholisch-Theologische Fakultät of Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, in Germany, sent us these impressions:

Many of us are aware of the controversies around the division between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ as the boundary defining what is acceptable in public and what should be kept private. But the awareness that dividing the world into multiple ‘religions’ is equally controversial is not as widely shared. Many see it simply as a benign fact of life. However, as scholars of the so-called ‘critical religion’ point out, the very idea of ‘World Religions’ emerged largely as a colonial project, a way of handling diversity in the conditions of global imperial operations. In other words, those boundaries are largely artificial. And that construction begins to crumble as things start to move around. Increasing numbers of unaffiliated, that is, those who reject formal religious affiliations, do not necessarily eschew all elements of what would conventionally be understood as religiosity. Instead, they engage in their personal negotiations of complex networks of belonging, behaving, and believing. Similarly, those who remain affiliated do not overtly focus on the formal pronouncements of their affiliation. These changes make religion less ‘legible’ for external observers like administrators, or scholars, but might result in a renewed interest in theology and creative approaches to it.