The transformation of public and private activities and qualities into numerical data, enabling the tracking and prediction of a variety of phenomena and processes, has been greatly enhanced by the latest digital forms of quantification, data mining and big data analytics. The proliferation of quantification and datafication has not been free of controversy; it has been attributed to the expansion of a neoliberal form of governance that ultimately eliminates genuine democratic deliberation. However, long before the digitisation of communication and the internet, the quantification of public opinion through opinion polls in the 1930s demonstrated the important societal effects of quantification in governance and research. Both earlier and more recent debates on the ambivalence of public opinion polls and their important implications, which would either promote or hinder the development of democracy, contribute to the identification and interpretation of wider societal opportunities and threats to publicness arising from quantification and datafication.

Four decades after Bryce expressed the idea of a ‘higher level of public opinion development’ in which ‘the will of the majority could be determined at any time without having to pass it on through a representative body and perhaps even without the need to use the electoral machinery’ (Bryce 1888/1995, 919), his idea came true in opinion polls on representative samples. Bryce was pessimistic at the time, indicating that such a development was completely utopian, mainly because of technical difficulties, as ‘machines for weighing or measuring the will of the people from week to week or from month to month have not yet been and probably never will be invented’ (ibid.). However, history soon proved that his pessimism was unfounded.

Just a few years after the vibrant disputes over public opinion in the early twentieth century in Europe and the United States, discussions have, oddly enough, almost completely died down. This did not happen because the position of the round table of American political scientists would have been generally approved or because a conclusive theoretical definition would have been reached unexpectedly but because of the development and use of methodological and statistical tools in the empirical research of individual and collective attitudes – opinion polling.

Today's study of philosophy in the analytic tradition—of language, mind, knowledge and value—is beholden to a history and tradition that is characterized by its respect for argument and, at its best, a striving for clarity. Although its concerns and methodology go back to antiquity, today's practice in various subdisciplines has—whether we realize it or not—been sculpted by the advances in classical logic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Mill, Frege and Russell and its embrace by subsequent philosophers of language hoping to account for the semantics of natural language expressions.

In his summary of fin de siècle philosophy of language and mind, Tyler Burge outlines two traditions that evolved from postpositivist philosophy. The first, deriving from Frege and taking science, logic, or mathematics as the source of inspiration for linguistic and philosophical investigation, “distrusted intuition and championed theory.” Frege's contribution to mathematical logic, Burge recounts, reached its apex in the mid- to late twentieth century with attempts to provide an account of the truth conditions, logical form, and compositional structure of natural language. Metaphysics in the analytic tradition, rejected by positivists as meaningless, was resurrected by Quine as ontological questions were recast in terms of the theoretical advantages of admitting candidates as the objects of bound variables in a formal language. Eventually, topics in domains Quine thought to be recalcitrant from a scientific point of view—for example, mind and meaning—would be embraced by his adherents who sought to broaden his naturalist program. In the last third of the twentieth century, philosophy of mind replaced philosophy of language as the predominant field and conceptual analysis was in many quarters nudged aside as philosophers refocused their inquiries on the nature of the “phenomenon itself,” as opposed to the natural language expressions that served, so they alleged, imperfectly to identify it. “Naturalism” became the cri de coeur of philosophers in several subdisciplines. Conundrums brought to center stage in the seventeenth century about the nature of the mental and of knowledge were rewritten in a new key to suit the emerging computer paradigm and its prominent role in cognitive psychology.

Rab Butler's biographer, Anthony Howard, referred to the Education Act 1944 as ‘the single memorial of which Rab would always remain proudest’. The Act renamed the Board of Education to become the Ministry of Education and differentiated between primary, secondary and further education, making LEAs responsible for ensuring that secondary education would be free and universally provided. It ushered in the tripartite system of education of grammar, secondary modern and technical schools. However, comparatively few technical schools were ever established, so in reality it was a bipartite system that came into existence. The Act also revolutionised both the position of the voluntary church schools that existed alongside the State schools and the teaching of religion in both types of school. Prior to the Act, the ban on teaching by catechism only applied to those schools completely run by local authorities. As Butler himself noted in his autobiography, voluntary schools which were mostly run by the churches, ‘gave the religious instruction of the Church to which they belonged, while local authority schools gave religious instruction unconnected with the formulary or beliefs of any particular Church’. Moreover, many areas were what he called ‘single-school’ areas where the Church of England school was the only school available and ‘non-conformists naturally resented sending their children to a school which taught the catechism of the Church of England’.

Yet, Butler's reforms would strengthen rather than weaken the position of the Church of England. It has been noted that under the Butler Act ‘the role of Anglicanism within education was not only secured but enlarged’. Butler saw the 1902 Act as having damaged both the Conservative Party and the Church of England, and so the Act that he would be remembered for was ‘an attempt to bring Church and state back together and reverse the effects of 1870 and 1902 in keeping them apart’. These earlier reforms had left unfinished business and education reform had long been mooted. However, the road to reform was to prove rocky with matters often being outside Butler's control. This chapter tells that story.

The Road to Reform

It was manoeuvres from religious leaders themselves that were to prove influential. In February 1941 leaders of the Church of England and the Free Churches published a joint letter to The Times laying out their ‘five points’ for reform.

In 2022, we commemorate the centenary of the publication of Ferdinand Tönnies's voluminous, in-depth Kritik der Öffentlichen Meinung (Critique of Public Opinion) and Walter Lippmann's influential and provocative book Public Opinion. Tönnies's book was a unique attempt to conceptualise public opinion as an essential part of the general theory of society renowned for the Gemeinschaft–Gesellscahft dichotomy. It remained largely ignored, though, much like the book of Tönnies's older thought companion Gabriel Tarde, L’Opinion et la Foule (Public Opinion and the Crowd), published two decades earlier (1901). In contrast, Lippmann's work and the famous Lippmann–Dewey debate on public opinion in the 1920s still resonate in the literature today. The influence of the aforementioned valuable ideas from the beginning of the last century, however, was greatly weakened by the invention of opinion polls. With the rise of opinion polls in the 1930s and subsequent decades, critical thinking about publicness and public opinion was largely marginalised. The long-lasting ontological and epistemological crisis in critical studies of public opinion and publicness ended in the late 1980s with the publication of the English translation of the work of another German author, Jürgen Habermas: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, first published 40 years after Tönnies's Kritik. Habermas's work continues the classical tradition of the social theory of publicness but also radically breaks with it. Thus, it has sparked vibrant debates and disputes over ‘the public sphere’ up to the present time.

A century after the vibrant in-depth theoretical debates on public opinion, we seem to be facing completely different problems, largely stemming from the development of digital communication technologies. The increasing availability of digital communication channels and networks has changed the nature and the significance of human communication. All human activities from economics and politics to the arts and education have become inextricably linked to the use of digital communication technologies and networks. Easier access not only allows an exponentially growing number of people to communicate more efficiently and express their views publicly, no matter what they are, but also allows corporate-owned social network platforms to systematically and often covertly monitor and influence users’ online communication and even offline behaviour.

The year 2020 will always be remembered as the year the Covid pandemic hit. As with other pandemics throughout history, Covid-19 has already had significant economic, social, political and legal effects. Some effects will take time before they can be seen clearly, but one significant effect of the 2020 Covid pandemic in the United Kingdom that is already visible has been the strengthening of the devolved powers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Since health was a devolved matter, increased attention was shone on the leaders and legislators of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast as the various nations of the United Kingdom dealt with Covid differently.

However, another significant change also occurred in Wales in 2020 in regard to a different devolved matter. While grappling with Covid, Wales’ politicians were also debating and legislating for a brand new curriculum for Wales’ schools. The result, the Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021, will transform the education sector and the ways in which children will be taught. It is the most radical change for at least thirty years and is probably the most significant Act passed by the Welsh Senedd to date.

This is particularly true regarding the place of religion in schools in Wales. Previously, schools in Wales followed the same law as schools in England. Now in Wales, Religious Education will be renamed Religion, Values and Ethics. Parents will no longer have the right to opt their children out of these lessons. The way in which syllabuses will be written will change with humanist and non-religious organisations playing a greater role, with schools having more freedom and with more Wales-wide guidance. The Act's provisions will also apply to so-called faith schools in Wales: specific rules will apply to schools with a religious character to ensure that they seek to strike a balance between the schools operating in a way that, on the one hand, reflects their ethos and the rights of parents and, on the other, ensures that children receive pluralistic teaching on religion if they so wish.

This book tells the story of how Wales is transforming how religion is taught in its schools and asks what lessons can be learned.

When I started writing this book, I had never heard of Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage. Before becoming a historian, I worked for more than a dozen years in media production and, like so many of my female colleagues, was unaware of the achievements and efforts of my trailblazing predecessors. A few years ago, I was talking to one of Australia's leading film producers – a woman who started her career at the ABC in the 1970s – and asked if she had been inspired by any of the earlier generations of radio and television producers. She confessed she had never heard of them. Why have women been so absent in histories of media production? In the post-war decades, Australian broadcasting expanded into an increasingly complex and diverse industry, requiring a variety of workers and specialists. Surely, women workers made substantial contributions? The journey for this book began with a search to discover if the lack of women in Australian media history was, in fact, an accurate representation of their actual contributions over the decades. I discovered that for much of the twentieth century, Australia's media histories often ignore the contributions of women behind the scenes. As film scholar Annette Blonski lamented, ‘so much of our history exists merely as footnotes to accounts of the exploits of famous men’.

Early in my research, I came across ABC commentator Ellis Blain's 1977 memoir, Life with Aunty: Forty Years with the ABC. In the opening paragraph, Blain wrote, ‘Talking to some of the men who have shaped the ABC of today soon convinced me that I had been wise to avoid a commitment to a history in depth. Many of those who should have contributed to such an enterprise are already dead, and some of those who are alive make no secret of their determination that the mistakes, politics and intrigues will continue to rest in peace.’ When I read this, I was immediately struck by Blain's determination that it was men who built the ABC. I was also disconcerted by the preferred practice of ‘forgetting’ uncomfortable aspects of the past. It was a timely reminder of the need to revise the limited historical narratives which selectively celebrate the good and ignore the more complex aspects of an organisation's history, even one as well-intentioned as the ABC.

For the past few decades romance has been the popular genre par excellence in the English-speaking world. With sales figures that average around $1.36 billion a year, a readership of nearly 75 million people in the United States alone, and a 13.4 percent share of the American consumer book market in 2011, the popular romance novel is by far the best-selling genre in America. In 2010 a staggering 8,240 new romance titles were released in the United States, and 469 of these novels became national or international bestsellers. Harlequin, the most important romance publisher in the world, “publishes more than 100 titles a month, in both print and digital formats, in 17 countries and 16 languages,” and since its inception in the mid-twentieth century an astounding total of over 6.8 billion popular romance novels have been sold by this publisher alone.

While these impressive numbers indisputably establish the widespread popularity of romance, the genre has been studied very sparsely. Even though the scholarly examination of popular culture has become a respectable and well-established academic pursuit, few scholars turn their critical gaze toward this most popular (and feminine) of genres. Studies of the popular romance novel are consequently few and far between, and within this relatively small body of work attention to the material aspects of the genre has been very limited despite the fact that the material conditions of popular novels are of major importance since they function as sites of intense debate concerning the status, meaning, and identity of the books.

This lack of critical attention paid to the romance novel in general and its material characteristics in particular may be a consequence of the widespread cultural prejudice that all romance novels are essentially the same. Although academics are generally taught to be critical of cultural stereotypes, in the case of the popular romance novel the academy seems to overwhelmingly buy into—and frequently even be at the origin of—the ingrained stereotypes of conventionality, formula, and simplicity that surround the genre. As a result, the popular romance genre is largely ignored by academics, who deem books that are supposedly all the same unworthy of their critical attention. Somewhat surprisingly, a similar mechanism plays out within the developing field of popular romance studies with regard to the genre's materiality.

What books essentially are is still an intriguing question, especially due to the rise of e-books, e-texts, and e-readers. Electronic reading devices—like the Kindle and the iPad, computer monitors and screens, and the displays of handheld tablets and mobile phones—have redefined not only what reading is but also what books are and can be, as texts are increasingly written, distributed, and read on electronic media. What are the intersections, interactions, and reciprocal influences between both the analogue and the digital, between conventional and electronic writing, printing/publishing, and reading? How are books changed by this development, and how can “bookishness” be seen as combining both traditional print and electronic books? To what extent is “bookishness” related to the materiality of written or printed books, to the form and format of books, to printed books as material things and tactile/sensual objects? On what does their cultural and social status depend if e-books become more and more common? Do e-books still represent the end of the book as printed matter and material object, or do printed books still possess some degree of resistance and inalienability? Are electronic media the end or the future of reading?

So far, these new electronic devices and reading practices have not fundamentally altered what could be considered to be a book. On the contrary, they also seem to support the old-fashioned attributes and values related to printed books and their specific distribution and reception. It still seems to be a question not of printed versus electronic books but rather of how books and e-books are produced, distributed, and used: incautiously and carelessly or meticulously and carefully, paying tribute to the centuries-old traditions of fine print and typographic standards. It might be the case that typography, as a more or less ideal combination of an easy and comfortable-to-read layout that arranges graphic signs in a certain size and format (including the interplay between margin and text or between black and white), is essential for any symbol-carrying device and any printing/publishing process. If so, then the most important reading instrument would be the page and likely also the double page as a display or synoptic carrier of typographic signs that constitute—in a series of pages—the written or printed book in the codex format. This is again related to the material form of the book and its cultural and social status.

Six years past Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage, it is possible to dispassionately assess the dire claims about “redefining” marriage. Allowing “Adam and Steve” to marry undercuts the association between marriage and procreation, same-sex marriage opponents contended (Gallagher 2008). Of course, marriage is an important site for childrearing, too—both for opposite-sex and same-sex couples.

In the years before Obergefell, a steady drumbeat of articles claimed or assessed whether same-sex marriage would redefine marriage, crescendoing around Obergefell, as Figure 1 shows.

Public opinion polling shows Americans have come to embrace LGBT identities and same-sex marriage. With 20/20 hindsight, Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent that “[s]tealing this issue from the people will […] mak[e] a dramatic social change […] more difficult to accept” feels overblown.

What is troubling for longer-term implications of Obergefell is lawmakers’ subsequent attempts—thankfully, now mostly stalled-out—to “get the government out of the marriage business, altogether” (Ablow 2013). This is the idea that, in U.S. Senator Rand Paul's words, “the time has come to examine whether or not governmental recognition of marriage is a good idea” (2015). Religious leaders latched onto this seductively simple response. More than 700 Christian figures pledged to cleave civil and religious marriage to avoid “implicat[ing] the Church in a false definition of marriage” (Radner and Seitz 2014). Lawmakers also took up the gauntlet. But they advanced quite different conceptions of what it would mean to “end marriage” (Lindenberger 2009)— from shifting the responsibility for issuing marriage licenses to the church to redefining marriage entirely as domestic partnerships (Rutherford 2016).

The dangerous idea of radically transforming the state's relationship to marriage took hold. This occurred despite the fact that well-drawn statutory protections offering robust exemptions to religious communities could mute the impact on religious dissenters without entirely overhauling the current institution of marriage. Instead, lawmakers advanced the far more ambitious platform of cleaving marriage away from the state, taking a page from feminists. And yet those advocating for this separation—from feminists to religious advocates—presumably were concerned for vulnerable persons in their own communities, who would likely fare worse.

By the late 1960s, Guy Debord was able to confidently pronounce that

This axiom, the opening words of his tract The Society of the Spectacle, rewrites the famous opening lines of Karl Marx's Capital cited earlier: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist system of production prevails presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’,” while the next sentence echoes an even more famous line from The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air.” Debord's axiom launches a section of his text entitled “Separation Perfected,” the sentiment expressed in this second sentence: dwelling in the incessant, awe-inspiring exhibition of imagery that consumes us all, we have been separated from our natural modes of being. We live, instead, in a world of misrepresentations, enormously attractive but essentially deceptive images whose array we do not control, and which is managed against our interests. Sound familiar? The section ends with his second axiom: “The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” (Fig. 5.1).

For all of their rhetorical exaggeration—The Society of the Spectacle is, before it is anything else, a polemic—Debord's statements remain relevant to the critical understanding of the exhibitionary economies that today persist—and, indeed, appear to prevail—as modern conditions of production turn into contemporary ones. Debord ostensifies his axioms as a series of self-generating statements, in the manner of Euclid's Geometries and Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the philosophy of history,” but mostly by patching and pasting from Marx on commodity fetishism and from then recently released early writings by Marx, notably his “Theses on Feuerbach.” This technique, a verbal collage, enables him to take several interesting tracks as he moves from the first to the second axiom. These tracks are not random. Each maps a historical trajectory into the present. For our purposes, his most relevant points concern the exhibitionary character of capitalism, which he rightly sees as fundamentally, and deceptively, visual in its operations—as, in a word, an iconomy.

This chapter aims to explain the historical and contemporary conceptual terrain over which queer and religious actors are operating, especially in relation to the state's recognition of same-sex relations. I first cast some light on the link between secularization and secularism with a view to determining what we are to understand by these terms. Then, I discuss an alternative view of secularization as an integral part of the state-building processes in Europe. In doing so, I explain why the theoretical toolkit of “legal pluralism” proves particularly enlightening in rethinking the role and place of sub-state normative regimes within states. Finally, I briefly apply my arguments to the ongoing struggle for same-sex marriage in numerous countries around the world. I argue that in a truly post-secular society the legal order should allow people—whether queer or religious—to produce “their own law” and make available a plurality of regulatory models.

Shortcomings of the Post-Secularization Thesis

The prefix of “post-secularization” conveys the idea of going beyond, but one needs to ask whether secularization is something one can really go beyond. I am not referring to the question of whether contemporary politics can dispense with secularization, but the question of whether or not secularization has ever existed as an actual phenomenon. If secularization never really occurred, talk of post-secularization runs two risks. First, it could tell a story that does not stand close scrutiny. Second, and more importantly, it could be contributing to a mistaken understanding of the historical processes it refers to. The case I want to make is that secularization was not so much an actual phenomenon as it was a narrative meant to produce reality. One of its main effects is what Charles Tilly identifies as “the major unanswered question in European history” (Tilly 1989, 563)—that is, the political form called “state.”

I am not arguing that secularization is something merely discursive concerning the modern state or that it merely played a role in the establishment of the fundamental distinction between the secular and the religious realms. As a signifier, secularization does refer to a bundle of both signified and actual phenomena.