Is Multi-Faith Paradigm Secularism 2.0? On the Extra-Institutional Development of Multi-Faith Spaces

The Multi-Faith Spaces (MFS) are a relatively new invention, and yet they quickly gained in significance. On one hand, they are a convenient solution for satisfying needs of people having diverse beliefs in the institutional context of places such as hospitals, schools, airports and the like. On the other hand, as Andrew Crompton pointed out, they are politically significant because the multi-faith paradigm “is replacing Christianity as the face of public religion in Europe” as successor of secularism (2012, p. 493). Due to their ideological entanglement, however, they are often used as the means to promote either a more privatised version of religion, or a certain denominational preference. Two diverse kinds of design are used to achieve these means: negative in the case of the former, and positive for the latter. Neither is without problems, and neither adequately fulfils their primary purpose of serving diverse groups of believers. Both, however, seem to follow the biases and main problems of secularism. In this paper, I analyse recent developments of the MFS to detail their main problems and answer the question, whether the MFS, and the underlying Multi-Faith Paradigm, can be classified as a continuation of secularism.