Religion, values and knowledge-power in contemporary secular spaces: the case of an English medical centre

Authors

• Kim Knott University of Leeds

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67307

Keywords:

Power (Religion), Health, Health care, Medical care, Alternative medicine, Holistic medicine, Therapeutics, Spirituality, Great Britain, Methodology, Secularism, Medical policy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the way in which knowledge-power is exercised in contemporary controversies in healthcare, and what this flexing of discursive muscles shows about the nature of secularity and its relationship to religion. The discussion is focused on two controversial issues at the heart of general medical practice in the UK: the doctor–­patient relationship and complementary and alternative medicine. As will become clear, participation in these debates is not restricted to doctors alone, but increasingly to government departments, professional medical and scientific bodies, therapists beyond the medical mainstream, and patients themselves. What is interesting for scholars of religion is the way in which the debates (which are not confined only to discourse, but are also reflected in physical and social spaces) reveal deep-seated but dynamic values. The debates themselves, and many of the values and opinions expressed in association with them, are ostensibly ‘secular’, but, as we shall see, ‘religion’ has an interesting place within them. It variously enters the scene as a crit­ical tool, the butt of jokes, the enemy or a potentially fruitful partner (particularly in its nascent guise as ‘spirituality’). The author suggests that there are two important outcomes of this examination: first, the opening up of a secular organisation and exposure of the heterogeneity of value and knowledge positions within it, and, secondly, the recognition that methodological tools from within the study of religions (in this case a spatial analysis for locating religion) can be put to use in such an examination, in pursuit of a fuller understanding of secularity.