Religion and the public sphere: the spatial theory of Michel de Certeau and religious space

The public and academic debate of the relationship of religion and secularity is ongoing. Religion continues as a matter of increasing interest as public expressions of religion challenge perceived social norms that are often expressed using dichotomies of private and public, reason and belief, sacred and secular. New methods for conceiving religion and its public presence are being proposed building on critiques of the incompatibility of religion and secularity. One specific area where this is taking place is the public sphere. The usual approach is to generalize the complex relation between religion and secularity, with religion understood primarily as a set of moral claims or as a socializing community while secularity is understood in the function and tacit background of the public sphere. On these grounds, particular instances where religion and secularity intersect, integrate or conflict can be simplistically categorized using categories like private and public or sacred and secular. These explanations do not adequately reflect the complexities of religious presence and practice. There is a gap in exploring the ways that religious meaning is practiced by ordinary citizens within a secular milieu. This thesis contributes to filling this by using Michel de Certeau's spatial theory as a means of seeing religion as a technique of everyday life, practiced within the physical, mental, and social arena's in which it is located. Rather than offering a different simplification of the relationship between religion and the public sphere, I complicate the relationship to open up what spaces of religion are overlooked by the usual approaches.
There are two central arguments to this thesis. First, it demonstrates that a spatial approach to religion can highlight religious practices as embodying particular ways of inhabiting the world. Towards this end, it reconsiders the relationship between religion and secularity. Second, the dissertation argues that de Certeau's spatial concepts of lieu and espace and strategy and tactics provide a clear theoretical framework for identifying varieties of religious phenomena in religious and ostensibly non-religious places.