As the economic power of the average individual changes and thus the availability of a wider assortment of chosen identities opens up, ‘monopolistic’ claims about what constitutes identity lose their social and imaginative plausibility: we are always going to be aware of perfectly credible and attractive alternatives to the demands made by traditional forms of belonging. It is no longer obvious why we should live like that. Thus what remains of traditionally shaped identity will slip further and further towards a reservoir of material which people can draw on as they put together an identity they have chosen.
Compare this with Hanna Rosin’s book the End of Men reviewed in the NY Times
And so, a new matriarchy is emerging, run by young, ambitious, capable women who — faced with men who can’t or won’t be full partners — are taking matters into their own hands.
Back to the Rowan Williams piece
But what if it is wrong to see traditional religious affiliation as a matter of deciding like this, as if we were just talking about ‘lifestyle choices’? Traditional styles of religious commitment were nothing much to do with resolving to think or do this or that: they were environments in which people were supplied with a set of possible roles within a comprehensive narrative, a set of possible projects shaped by the governing story. The aim of life was to act in a way that lets the story come through, that shows to the world what we believe is most real. Freedom was imagined as the liberty to embody an objective truth. Freedom was what happened when we were delivered from a state of illusion and unreality, the unreality of letting our lives be shaped by nothing but instinct or arbitrary choice.
Morality becomes not a matter of compliance with arbitrary rules enforced by threat but the struggle to identify and move with the direction of fundamental creative action as it has shown itself to us. Freedom is indeed the freedom to be in union with this act; anything less is going to be ultimately frustrating and self-destructive. But freedom in this sense, a freedom that allows for radical change, is triggered only by the clear representation or realisation of an unconditional divine gift within the world’s own story. And this at once involves us in claims about uniquely revelatory or transforming events, in dealing with questions about where we can best stand in order to see, with some measure of authoritative clarity, the direction, the ‘flow’ of things with which we seek harmony.
and how Islam has impacted the conversation
We have noted the large-scale cultural shift which has made post-religious spirituality seem in some ways better adapted to contemporary conditions than classical religious practice; but we should also note some encouraging signs which suggest that the movement is not all one-way. The growing presence in Europe of a substantial and confident form of classical religious practice in the shape of Islam has put the quest for detached non-sectarian spiritual capital in perspective: post-religious spirituality has to compete with an articulate corporate voice which stubbornly resists being made instrumental to the well-being of an unchallenged Western and capitalist modernity.
Leadingchurch.com 