Faith in Conversation: Translation, Translanguaging, and the British God Debate

Abstract

Faith in Conversation: Translation, Translanguaging, and the British God Debate Taking ideas about interfaith communication among stakeholders in the British "God Debate" as an illustrative case, I propose that the translation metaphor, widely adopted across disciplines, might productively be replaced by a different metaphor, "translanguaging" (García and Wei 2013). I suggest that the model of sociolinguistic relations offered by translanguaging nicely addresses the genealogical inseparability of "religious" language and "secular" language. This working replacement for the translation metaphor invites new kinds of philosophical and anthropological engagements with difference and may be extended to the analysis of other phenomena that demand nonbinary thought, such as transculturalism, transgenderism and transnationalism. [translation metaphor, translanguaging, Britain, religion, interfaith dialogue] IntroductionT wo decades ago, the American philosopher Richard Rorty coined the provocative phrase "religion as a conversation-stopper," arguing that religious justifications had no place in liberal-democratic debate. Responding to criticism that pious folks are forced to "restructure their arguments in purely secular terms before they can be presented," Rorty (1999:173) replied that " 'restructuring the arguments in purely secular terms' just means 'dropping reference to the source of the premises of the arguments,' and that this omission seems a reasonable price to pay for religious liberty." Less than a decade later, Rorty reconsidered, admitting that he was unlikely to convince religious people to "trim their utterances" to fit his ideal kind of public reason. Nevertheless, he urged citizens of democratic countries to "keep the conversation going without citing unarguable first principles, either philosophical or religious" (Rorty 2003:148-149).By that time, many leading philosophers, prominent among them Jürgen Habermas, had begun protracted inquiry into the role that religion could play in deliberative democratic process. Suggesting that religious people speak "religious" and secularists "secular," Habermas, building on the work of philosopher John Rawls, softened Rorty's argument, suggesting that demanding total erasure of religious convictions from the public sphere placed an onerous burden on the pious. But he also asserted that, in order for religious people to speak in the liberal public sphere, they must subscribe to a "translation proviso":Instead of subjecting all citizens to the imposition of cleansing their public comments and opinion of religious rhetoric, an institutional filter should be established between informal bs_bs_banner Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 25, Issue 2, pp. 173-194, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12088. 173 communication in the public arena and formal deliberations of political bodies that yield to collectively binding decisions. (Habermas 2011:26) In order for religious v...

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