Religious Belonging Research Articles

Playing Many Religion-Games: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Multiple Religious Belonging

Abstract Using resources from Ludwig Wittgenstein and George Lindbeck, this paper develops a new conceptual tool for the understanding of religious identity: the ‘religion-game’. Although related to Wittgenstein’s language-games and drawing on Lindbeck‘s cultural-linguistic model of religion, this conceptual tool produces new results when applied to examples of multiple religious belonging. Drawing on the existing literature about the practice of multiple religious participation in Western countries, two realistic examples are developed at length and it is shown that the concept of a religion-game can help people to express their religious belonging in more positive ways. In particular, the many everyday choices made by people with more than one religious affiliation are clarified as choices to participate in some religion-games but not others. This de-emphasises the role of identity, often assumed to be singular, in religious belonging and enables an emphasis on behaviour which both fits with the turn towards ‘lived religion’ and permits a vivid and accurate account of the experience of at least two common paths to multiple religious belonging.

Multiple Religious Belonging after Religion: Theorising Strategic Religious Participation in a Shared Religious Landscape as a Chinese Model

Abstract It is argued that the concept of Multiple Religious Belonging as normally conceived relies upon a problematic construction of “religion” which can be expressed as the World Religions Paradigm. This relies upon a modern Western Protestant bias as to how “religion” should be understood. It is argued that religion can be understood otherwise, and looking at the Chinese context an argument is made that participation in different religious traditions relies upon a very different construct from Multiple Religious Belonging via the World Religions Paradigm model. This is termed Strategic Religious Participation in a Shared Religious Landscape. It considers the way that Chinese religiosity does not have fixed borders in the same way as the World Religions Paradigm suggests. Indeed, asking whether there is Multiple Religious Belonging in traditional Chinese thought seems to misconstrue the situation. A final reflection asks whether this new paradigm, of Strategic Religious Participation in a Shared Religious Landscape, may be appropriate to look at the contemporary Western context amongst a number of religious “nones”. Although no definitive answer is given to this question, the issue highlights that the World Religions Paradigm which shapes our sense of Multiple Religious Belonging may need to be rethought within different contexts.

How Does it Fit? Multiple Religious Belonging, Spiritual but not Religious, and The Dances of Universal Peace

Abstract Are people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) actually practicing multiple religious belonging (MRB)? Or are “multiple religious participation” or “multiple religious involvement” better designations? This article suggests that “multiple religious orientation” fits their practices better. But a subset of the SBNR movement, The Dances of Universal Peace, is used as a case study in straddling the boundaries between MRB and SBNR. It also suggests ways to understand and locate the practices of SBNRs within the MRB discussion.

Crow Jesus: Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging, edited by Mark Clatterbuck

Crow Jesus: Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging, edited by Mark Clatterbuck

Religion and the Political Engagement of Latino Immigrants: Bridging Capital or Segmented Religious Assimilation?

This paper uses the Latino Immigrant National Election Study (LINES) to better understand the relationship between religion and immigrant political and civic engagement. Over the last half century, both American religion and the immigration landscape have changed in important ways. The LINES, which includes a number of religious questions from the American National Election Study and a rare focus on Latino newcomers, provides the opportunity to better understand the contemporary relationship between the two. We find that measures of religious belongings, beliefs, and behaviors (the Three Bs) are not generally associated with the civic and political engagements of Latino immigrants. We posit that such null results may be explained by the varying religious experiences of immigrants—some developing bridging social capital through religious institutions, but others experiencing what might be called segmented religious assimilation.

Religious Belonging Today: Strategy and Values of Old-Believers and Neo-Pagans (Ural Case)

In contemporary Russia, on the one hand, there is a marked tendency towards re-strengthening of Orthodox Church. On the other hand, new patterns of religion and religious behaviour are manifest. This paper examines the alternative moral discourse in framework of “right-wing” religious practices in Ural region. Taking a comparative approach to religiosity, this investigation deals with different trajectories taken by Old-believers and Neopagans in Ural region to create new moral and social order for contemporary Russia. How do the people of different religious denominations within limits of region want to arrange their place, what do they aspire to, what do they want to express, and by what means? How do they create and maintain social cohesion? How do they express mutual acceptance and recognition, and how do they withhold it? These problems can obviously be described in terms of continuity and change, since religious models are either to be borrowed from some close or distant sources or to be elaborated anew according to particular social and ideological contexts.

Religious Belonging, Religious Agency, and Women's Autonomy in Mozambique.

Women's autonomy has frequently been linked with women's opportunities and investments, such as education, employment, and reproductive control. The association between women's autonomy and religion in the developing world, however, has received less attention, and the few existing studies make comparisons across major religious traditions. In this study, we focus on variations in levels of female decision-making autonomy within a single religious tradition-Christianity. Using unique survey data from a predominantly Christian area in Mozambique, we devise an autonomy scale and apply it to compare women affiliated to different Christian denominations as well as unaffiliated women. In addition to affiliation, we examine the relationship between autonomy and women's religious agency both within and outside their churches. Multivariate analyses show that women belonging to more liberal religious traditions (such as Catholicism and mainline Protestantism) and tend to have higher autonomy levels, regardless of other factors. These results are situated within the cross-national scholarship on religion and women's empowerment and are interpreted in the context of gendered religious dynamics in Mozambique and similar developing settings.

Rituais fúnebres no islã: notas sobre as comunidades muçulmanas no Brasil

Resumo Concepções e rituais associados à morte ocupam uma importante dimensão nas diferentes construções da tradição islâmica, criando não apenas sentido/orientação a respeito do fim inevitável da vida física, mas também canais para afirmação pública de crenças e pertencimentos religiosos para muçulmanos em diferentes contextos históricos e culturais. Seguindo nesta direção, o artigo pretende abordar concepções e práticas associadas à morte no islã, tendo como foco os rituais de preparação e o destino final do corpo do morto. O universo etnográfico em que esta pesquisa se baseia compreende as comunidades muçulmanas do Rio de Janeiro e Paraná, em diferentes momentos de trabalho de campo (2012 a 2014). Com isso, espera-se explorar como objetos e espaços funerários fazem o “morto muçulmano” em contextos nos quais o islã ocupa uma posição de minoria religiosa, como no Brasil.

Religion and Higher Education Achievement in Europe

Although religion has historically been a structuring dimension of higher education systems in Europe, very little research interrogates the contemporary link between religion and higher education. But why should that be done? Building from the European Social Survey data, we show that it helps understanding the roles played by higher education in a given society. Furthermore, it grasps religious belongings as a potential indicator of inequalities, along with ethnic and socio-economic background. It thus underlines the cognitive dimension of inequalities, and calls for a broader taking into account of individual belongings in their analysis.

Whose Buddhism? Whose Identity? Presenting and/or Misrepresenting Shin Buddhism for a Christian Audience: AAR Panel on Multiple Religious Belonging and Buddhist Identity November, 2013

Whose Buddhism? Whose Identity? Presenting and/or Misrepresenting Shin Buddhism for a Christian Audience: AAR Panel on Multiple Religious Belonging and Buddhist Identity November, 2013

Spiritually Bilingual: Buddhist Christians and the Process of Dual Religious Belonging

Spiritually Bilingual:Buddhist Christians and the Process of Dual Religious Belonging Jonathan Homrighausen Sociologists studying convert Buddhism in America have found that a surprisingly large number of Buddhists also identify as Christian.1 However, little empirical literature examines these Buddhist-Christian “dual religious belongers.”2 This study aims to fill that gap. Based on extensive interviews with eight self-identified “Buddhist Christians” of varying levels of doctrinal and experiential understanding, this study examines the conversion process of these dual belongers and how they combine these religious traditions. Building on Michael von Brück’s contention that one’s first religion is like a mother tongue, I compare taking on a second religious tradition to learning a second language.3 As practitioners become more “fluent” in the second religion, they differentiate the two religions more clearly while combining them more seamlessly in their daily lives. methodology This study employs grounded theory and a qualitative, inductive methodology. Grounded theory is designed to elucidate the dynamic changes involved in a social process, with rich descriptions of categories and explanations for variations between different people’s experiences.4 While the use of qualitative methods with a small sample size means that my results have little statistical significance, such methods have been used in recent research on conversion and dual belonging and yield deep theoretical insight.5 Eight participants for this study were solicited via word of mouth, personal acquaintance, and posting in a Buddhist-Christian Yahoo Group. In particular, I focused on Buddhist-Catholic practitioners to limit my sample group. Interviews were conducted and recorded in person or on the phone over a three-month period in fall, 2011. Interviews were open-ended, each lasting from sixty to ninety minutes. Several participants later received a draft of the paper to ensure they felt adequately represented; five participants responded. Names of participants have been changed for [End Page 57] confidentiality. To complement these interviews, I also incorporate written accounts of Buddhist-Christian conversion from both Catholic and Protestant authors.6 participants’ backgrounds It can be difficult to define Buddhist identity in the West, as many people who regularly practice meditation in a sangha do not self-identify as Buddhist.7 This study focuses on those who both practice Buddhist and Christian spirituality and belong to religious groups of both traditions. The eight participants have a range of religious expertise and commitment to both traditions. In terms of Catholic identity, six are laypeople (one in a secular religious order), one a priest, and one a nun. Three participants are theology professors. Seven have been Catholics from birth. One spent a decade living in a Buddhist monastery, two of them are roshis, and five give Buddhist teaching or meditation instruction formally. Seven of them practice various forms of Ch’an or Zen, while one practices Tibetan Buddhism. Cathy went not from Catholicism to Buddhism, but from Buddhism to Catholicism. A former Mormon and Unitarian, she began learning meditation at a Ch’an temple. This Ch’an temple normally only reached out to the Chinese community, but there was a Taiwanese nun there who wanted to reach out to non-Chinese community members. After practicing there for a few years, Cathy moved to another location, where she could not find any sangha that fit her needs. After attending Mass with a friend, she decided to become Catholic because she needed a community. It was not a hard transition for Cathy, who described feeling in meditation “some kind of entity, whether you call it God or Creator or atomic process.” She was confirmed as a Catholic in 2011. Rachel has been a nun for fifty years and a practicing Zen Buddhist for thirty, ten of those years living and working in a Zen monastery in the mountains of California. She described feeling an emptiness in her faith, a lack of practical knowledge of how to attain the spiritual goals that her Catholic tradition had for her. After hearing Zen teacher Cheri Huber speak at a conference, she took Huber on as her teacher. She has facilitated meditation workshops for many years. Though meditation instruction is not her full-time ministry, “meditation is my life … so in a sense...

Keeping the Spiritual Home Fires Burning: Religious Belonging in Britain during the First World War

The religious impact of the First World War on the home front in Britain is assessed in terms of churchgoing and church membership and affiliation. Church attendance rose briefly at the start of the war but fell away thereafter in the Protestant tradition, accelerating a pre-existing trend, which was not reversed after 1918. The disruption caused by the war to the everyday life of organized religion probably accounts for the decrease, rather more than loss of faith. Church membership also declined during the war in the Anglican and mainstream Free Churches, albeit not for other denominations and faiths, but it temporarily revived after the war. This was not the case for non-member adherents and Sunday scholars whose reduction was more continuous.

Double Religious Belonging and Some Commonly Held Ideas about Dialogue and Conversion

There is often a perceived tension between dialogue on the one hand and conversion on the other hand. This article suggests that this tension may be related to religious conviction and religious belonging being seen as monolithic. A basic idea of this article is that there are suggestive empirical findings and relevant conceptual arguments about double religious belonging in a large sense, which lead to a profound questioning, which undermines established views of religion as comprehensive systems. This has implications for conceptions of dialogue and conversion. It is suggested that a consequence of taking into consideration double religious belonging in a broad sense is that established ideas of religions as comprehensive interpretative schemes are undermined. Instead, one would have to acknowledge the fragmented, partial, and contextual character of religion. Accordingly, interreligious dialogue and conversion must also be understood as diversified, variegated and fragmented phenomena. Dialogue is addressed to specific issues, in precise contexts, regarding particular concerns, and the same could generally be said of the aim to convert others.

Book Review: Hyphenated Christians: Towards a Better Understanding of Dual Religious Belonging. By Gideon Goosen

Book Review: Hyphenated Christians: Towards a Better Understanding of Dual Religious Belonging. By Gideon Goosen

Book Review: Crossing Religious Borders: Studies on Conversion and Religious Belonging

Book Review: Crossing Religious Borders: Studies on Conversion and Religious Belonging

“This is Not the Holy Land”: Gendered Filipino Migrants in Israel and the Intersectional Diversity of Religious Belonging

Social research has highlighted the positive outcomes of religious faith andpractice for integration and belonging amongst migrants of different genders.However narratives of Filipino migrants in Israel suggest that religion, genderand belonging may not go hand-in-hand. By applying Anthias’ intersectionalframework of ‘translocational positionality’, a wider range of religious faithcan be taken into account beyond gendered patterns amongst participants andactivists in religious communities. Religious belief and gender intersect withother social locations, leading to the expression of complex orientations tobelonging: where people believe they fit into the social order. Going beyondthe categories of religion and gender to take in other intersections is essentialin understanding the experiences of “non-organised” believers – and nonbelievers– as well as active religious participants.

‘This is Not the Holy Land’: Gendered Filipino Migrants in Israel and the Intersectional Diversity of Religious Belonging

Social research has highlighted the positive outcomes of religious faith and practice for integration and belonging amongst migrants of different genders. However narratives of Filipino migrants in Israel suggest that religion, gender and belonging may not go hand-in-hand. By applying Anthias’ intersectional framework of ‘translocational positionality’, a wider range of religious faith can be taken into account beyond gendered patterns amongst participants and activists in religious communities. Religious belief and gender intersect with other social locations, leading to the expression of complex orientations to belonging: where people believe they fit into the social order. Going beyond the categories of religion and gender to take in other intersections is essential in understanding the experiences of “non-organised” believers – and non-believers – as well as active religious participants.

Gradualist or Revolutionary Secularization? A Case Study of Religious Belonging in Inter-War Britain, 1918–1939

The timing of secularization in Britain remains a contested topic among historians and sociologists, some regarding it largely as a post-Second World War phenomenon (with the 1960s a critical decade), others viewing it as a more gradual process commencing in the Victorian era. The inter-war years (1918–1939) have been little studied in this context, notwithstanding a coincidence of social, economic, and political circumstances which might have been expected to trigger religious change. The extent of religious belonging during this period is reviewed, with reference to quantitative evidence, from two perspectives: churchgoing, and church membership and affiliation. Trends in church attendance are documented, including the demographic variables which shaped it and the effect of innovations such as Sunday cinema and Sunday radio broadcasts of religious services. A conjectural religious profile of the adult population of Britain, c. 1939 reveals that, while, relative to population, there was only marginal growth in professed irreligion and non-Christian faiths since c. 1914, there was accelerated decline in religious worship (notably in terms of regularity) and active affiliation to Protestant denominations. This shift to nominalism particularly impacted the historic Free Churches (the phenomenon had long existed in the Church of England). Examination of these two religious indicators for the inter-war years thus lends further support to the view that secularization in Britain is best seen as a progressive and protracted process.

Hyphenated Christians: Towards A Better Understanding of Dual Religious Belonging. By GideonGoosen. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. 172. Paper, $51.95.

Hyphenated Christians: Towards A Better Understanding of Dual Religious Belonging. By GideonGoosen. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. 172. Paper, $51.95.

Re-membering through film practices: Diasporic film culture and identity beyond the ‘homeland’

Abstract Contributing to the expanding field of cinema and diaspora studies, this article reports on a critical media ethnographic study of the Moroccan diaspora in Antwerp (Belgium) and its engagements with ‘homeland’ films. Unlike most previous studies on diasporic film culture, this case focuses on how a diasporic group deals with a relatively small homeland film industry. It was found that Moroccan films are especially linked to memories and nostalgia as well as to active social positionings vis-à-vis various socio-cultural formations. Hence, the notion of ‘re-membering’ is introduced to capture this dual engagement with homeland films. Further, the relative marginal position of ‘homeland’ films among the diaspora is used to reflect on the centrality of national homelands in conceptualizations of diaspora. Based on this study, sub- and supranational as well as local and religious belongings are highlighted as crucial markers of diasporic identity.