Atmospheres, ritual and play: the ‘Special Events' of the multifaith movement in a religiously diverse Australia

This thesis explores how multifaith actors, organisations or networks facilitate respectful encounters and relationships between religiously diverse people in Australia. This PhD is a branch of a larger Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded Discovery Project on ‘Religious Diversity in Australia: Strategies to Maintain Social Cohesion’ undertaken between 2018 and 2021. In 2013, my supervisor, Anna Halafoff, published her PhD, The Multifaith Movement: Global Risks and Cosmopolitan Solutions (2013). This was the first extensive study on multifaith in Australia and of multifaith as a social movement globally. Her corpus of work on multifaith and religious diversity (Halafoff 2010; Halafoff 2016; Halafoff 2020; Halafoff & Gobey 2018; Hedges & Halafoff 2015) was to provide the context for this research. This thesis builds on this foundation but broadens the research possibilities on the multifaith movement into the fields of performance studies and material religion. It raises questions about what multifaith actors do when they organise multifaith events, how they facilitate multifaith relationships, and how they mobilise these relationships to drive the cosmopolitan goals of respect for rights and diversity within the movement.
This thesis adopts the methodological and theoretical approach of performance autoethnography. This approach is a synthesis of the ontological, epistemological, and axiological positions of performance studies with the qualitative research methodology of autoethnography. Performance studies makes the ontological claim that people bring their social realities into being through performance. It includes the epistemological stance that it is by participating and observing these social dramas through our bodies that people come to know the world. Autoethnography similarly emphasises relational ethics, evocative descriptions, and autobiographical storytelling to explore broader social realities. It also aims to make the situatedness of the researcher transparent to reveal the power dynamics and structures that shaped the knowledge production process. They both have an axiological dimension to make the power dynamics of the social world visible to those in the field. The research entailed 25 interviews with multifaith actors, and nine interviews with attendees of multifaith events. It also involved participant observation fieldwork at nine multifaith events. All interviews and fieldwork were conducted between 2019 and 2020.
This thesis draws upon sociological and performance/material approaches to critique the problematic assumptions of what is described as the “dialogue-centred model of interfaith engagement” (Moyaert 2018, p. 5). A substantial portion of the literature understands multifaith relationships through the framework of interreligious dialogue. This perspective sees all multifaith activities as ‘dialogue’ between religious traditions, with the hermeneutical goal of achieving a better grasp of objective truth. It possesses a logocentric bias that implies that religious truth is passed on through textual traditions, and that those who participate in dialogue are representatives of those traditions. This can result in a narrow perspective of multifaith that over-emphasises the role of the educated elite of religious traditions and overlooks grassroots participation. Furthermore, the dialogue-centred model strongly influences how multifaith organisations operate on the ground. Scholarship that adopts a performance and/or material lens on multifaith is a small but growing field. It critiques the limitations set by the dialogue-centred model and offers new perspectives on multifaith practices
This thesis intends to move away from the dialogue-centred model and toward the performative, material, and relational side of multifaith. It explores atmospheres and describes two atmospheric modalities that are fostered at multifaith events, namely humble and empathic atmospheres. Secondly, it draws on Marianne Moyaert’s (2019) concept of ‘interrituality’ and explores how ritual participation and ritual-like events are used to negotiate multifaith relationships and boundaries. Thirdly, it analyses the critical capacity of multifaith through the elusive concept of play. Play is a subtle process whereby participants develop new ways of engaging with each other and the world. Finally, I note the contributions of scholars who have explored the materiality of multifaith, but also how the findings of this thesis differ from their insights. This thesis also explores how challenging the dialogue-centred model could provide new pathways towards resolving contemporary challenges faced by multifaith actors in Australia and beyond; specifically, the lack of meaningful participation of young people in the movement.
Recent data on the worldviews of Millennials and Generation Z in Australia and Canada (Halafoff, Shipley et al. 2020) demonstrate that young people have hybrid and idiosyncratic religious, spiritual, and nonreligious identities. They have also grown up at a time when religious institutions are under critique, and these young people thus demonstrate high reflexivity when engaging with diverse worldviews. Data on multifaith youth organisations (Halafoff 2020; Halafoff & Gobey 2018) also suggest that young people are more interested in participating in common action and responding to social issues. The dialogue-centred model is limited in understanding the lived realities of how young people are engaging with religion. As a result, young people struggle to find a voice in this movement that assumes that they need to be part of a single religious tradition to be considered legitimate participants.
The multifaith movement in Australia is undergoing a crisis of succession, and finding ways to include young people is a matter of urgency. Building on Halafoff’s (2013) previous observations, a key theme in this thesis is that the multifaith movement shifts with each generation to respond to contemporary challenges. The continuation of the movement lies in its ability to find respectful ways of engaging with not only the diversity of religious, spiritual, and nonreligious worldviews, but also the bigger picture of the intersecting “diversity of diversities” (Bouma, Halafoff & Barton 2022, p. 199). In this context of “worldview complexity” (Bouma et al. 2022, p. 197), the cosmopolitan vision of the multifaith movement is needed more than ever. One of the first steps to engage young people is to invite new ways of understanding where they fit into the movement. This thesis invites multifaith actors and scholars to consider the lived experiences of not only young people, but of anyone who has been excluded from the multifaith project. It also highlights how the next generations are re-articulating this vision to account for their experiences, goals and concerns. In doing so, this thesis contributes to an emerging perspective on what the multifaith movement is and could be.