Secular values and the location of religion: A spatial analysis of an English medical centre

Abstract

What do contemporary controversies in healthcare reveal about secular values and the location of religion within an English medical centre? Using a socio-spatial methodology designed to break open ideological perspectives and normative values, we analyse the doctor–patient relationship, complementary and alternative medicine, and an issue that bridges the two, evidence-based medicine. In the physical, social and mental spaces of the medical centre we uncover the traces of religious activity and roles, and of alternative therapeutic regimes often informed by spiritual or religious systems. Furthermore, we disclose the heterogeneity of values that comprise the secular worldview of one group of contemporary general practitioners.

Introduction

In this article, we look at the nature of values and the location of religion within an ostensibly non-religious or secular organisation, a medical centre, an example of frontline public health provision in the UK. Using a spatial methodology, informed by the socio-spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, we analyse ethnographic data in order to raise questions about the values and discourses at work in contemporary general medical practice. Our approach is broadly inductive, insofar as we do not start by presupposing or hypothesising the emergence of any particular values or discourses. Nevertheless, our work is contextualised by a perspective on religious/secular relations outlined by Knott (2005) which argues that, in the modern West, the religious and the secular are two sides of a single coin—‘a binary constitutive of modernity’ (Jantzen, 1998, p. 8)—and that European Christianity and secularity are historically enmeshed, and philosophically, legally and ethically intertwined (Taylor, 1998, Taylor, 2002; Asad, 2003) despite often appearing to be radically dissimilar and in opposition. Ideological distance and contestation can be explained historically and dialectically. According to Knott (2005), the religious and the secular—and a third post-secular position (which often makes use of the notion of ‘spirituality’ rather than ‘religion’ or ‘religiosity’)—form a field of knowledge-power relations (Foucault in Gordon, 1980; Carrette, 1999, Carrette, 2000). Debates and contests on this field are the means by which ideological positions are articulated, tested and authorised, boundaries between various positions are maintained and new positions and values begin to emerge.