Popular cultural relativism : religion, racial profiling and national multiculturalisms

This paper is concerned with the contemporary place of religion in multicultural Australia. It begins from the premise that despite the reality of multiculturtal programs and policies that expressly attend to the question of religious diversity and the recognition of religion, religion and religious identities remains widely understood as outside of multicultural discourse. This paper represents the starting point for a new research project based in part on a response to the Cronulla riots of December 2005 and the contemporary problematising of Islam in Australian society. However, beyond this the project will also be an investigation of the wider tensions between religious identities and the ongoing construction of a secularist Australian national community. In Australia, as in other western immigrant-receiving nations, serious questions have been asked of the ability of policies of multiculturalism to create a cohesive society (Bennett, 1998; Hage, 1998; Gunew, 1999; Mitchell, 1993; see Modood, 2005a for recent British comments). Multiculturalism has come under attack from the left and the right as variously too divisive, and hence fostering separation, or not representative enough, further entrenching inequalities. Regardless of the state of the debate it is clear that multiculturalism has suffered from, at its least, a narrow understanding, and at its worst, a wholesale misrepresentation. I do not have time to enter into these debates here. Suffice it to say that multiculturalism is not a fixed discourse, with disjuncture between the theoretical politics of difference or recognition and the policies formed in their name, with a marked variation in application across time and from place to place.