Faith Resilience: Everyday Experiences

Özlem Ögtem-Young

doi:10.3390/soc8010010

Abstract

The concept of resilience continues to be popular within various discourses and disciplines across the social and natural sciences, and has also been adopted politically and in policy. The concept’s extended and widening usage in ever-increasing contexts creates further complexities and contestation on what construes resilience. Generally, in these conceptualisations, resilience is a positive outcome following significant crisis and disaster at an extreme scale. However, such definitions and constructs ignore that resilience manifests itself in subtler and more mundane ways in people’s daily life and daily activities. This article explores how resilience is built into everyday life and how faith is used as a tool of resilience by individuals from diverse communities in their daily experiences in the city of Birmingham. This article contributes to the resilience literature by exposing examples of resilience as narrated during our in-depth interviews with participants (comprised of members from various new and established migrant ethnic communities), with particular attention given to faith as a form of resilience. This article argues that resilience manifests itself in the day-to-day experiences and practices of individuals and that faith can play an important role in individuals’ lives in overcoming and coping with the challenges of their daily stressors.

Highlights

This article aims to explore the relatively unexamined understandings of the concept of resilience that are prevalent in the day-to-day strategies and practices of people from diverse faith communities as well as ethnic and migrant backgrounds, with a particular focus on faith as a form of resilience.The attractiveness of the concept is continuously increasing, so too is the complexity and diversity of the cultural and social fabric of Western societies
All the themes reflect the conditions in which participants talked about the resilience that emanated from their faith in everyday contexts
Contrary to most of the literature connecting and discussing resilience in relation to adversity which is significant and devastating in scale, this study focuses on manifestations of resilience in the form of overcoming, coping, and recovering from the difficulties of daily challenges

Summary

Introduction

This article aims to explore the relatively unexamined understandings of the concept of resilience that are prevalent in the day-to-day strategies and practices of people from diverse faith communities as well as ethnic and migrant backgrounds, with a particular focus on faith as a form of resilience.The attractiveness of the concept is continuously increasing, so too is the complexity and diversity of the cultural and social fabric of Western societies. Larger cities in the UK, such as Birmingham—and elsewhere—have been described as ‘super-diverse’ The challenges that such increasing diversity or ‘super-diversity’—as characterised by recent new demographic and mobility patterns [1]—poses on the increasingly diverse communities living in these cities and countries are complex and multifaceted. Some of the particular challenges that these cities face are described as ‘new patterns of inequality and prejudice’; ‘new patterns of segregation’; and issues around ‘transnationalism and integration’ [1]. Such challenges can be part of the everyday experiences of individuals from ethnic minority communities and migrant groups, requiring them to draw resilience and coping strategies from various resources. Faith is acknowledged to be one of these resources, allowing individuals from faith communities to draw on it as a tool of resilience [4]

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