Edited by Abby Day, Giselle Vincett and Christopher R. CotterSocial Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular Edited by ABBY DAY University of Kent, UK GISELLE VINCETT Lancaster University, UK CHRISTOPHER R. COTTER Lancaster University, UK f Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORKFirst published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Abby Day, Giselle Vineett and Christopher R. Cotter 2013 Abby Day. Giselle Vincett and Christopher R. Cotter have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work A\ll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafier invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Social identities between the sacred and the secular / edited by Abby Day. Giselle Vineet and Christopher R. Cotter. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-5677-3 1. Group identity. 2. Identification (Religion) I. Day, Abby, 1956-, editor of compilation. HM753.86193 2013 305--de23 2012044683 ISBN 9781409456773 (hbk)Contents List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors Foreword by Grace Davie Introduction What Lies Between: Exploring the Depths of Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular Abby Day, Giselle Vincett and Christopher R. Cotter PART I: THE PUBLIC SPACE ‘The Religion-Sccular in International Politics: The Case of ‘Religious’ NGOs at the United Nations Jeremy Carrette and Sophie-Hélene Trigeaud Sartorially Sacred or Fashion Faux Pas? Visual Interpretations of Modesty Online Jane Cameron Acute Ambiguity: Towards a Heterotopology of Hospital Chaplaincy Peter Collins PART II: THE SOCIAL, IDENTITY-DOMINATED SPACE 4 wn Euro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians: Believing in Belonging Abby Day Multiple versus Unitary Belonging How Nepalis in Britain Deal with ‘Religion’ David N. Gellner and Sondra L. Hausner Queer Quakers: Negotiating Post-Christian Selfhoods within the Liberal Sphere Sally R. Munt xi 61viii Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular 7 ‘T've been christened, but I don’t really believe in it” How Young People Articulate their (Non-)Religious Identities, and Perceptions of (Non-)Belief Elisabeth Arweck 8 Betwixt and Between: A Canadian Perspective on the Challenges of Researching the Spiritual but Not Religious Lori G. Beaman and Peter Beyer PART II: THE METHODOLOGICAL SPACE 9 The Secular Sacred: In between or both/and? Kim Know 10 The Sounds of Silence: Searching for the Religious in Everyday Discourse Martin D. Stringer 11 Researching the Non-Religious: Methods and Methodological Issues, Challenges and Controversies Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor; Tristram Hooley, Nicki Moore, Kingsley Purdam and Paul Weller 12 Mapping ‘Religion’ — or ‘Something, I don’t know what’? Methodological Challenges Exploring Young Peoples” Relations with ‘Religion’ Anders Sjoborg Afterword by N.J. Demerath IIT Bibliography Index 103 127 161 191 201 205 229aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is 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unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.This page has been lefi blank intentionallyChapter 4 Euro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians Believing in Belonging Abby Day Introduction The chapter draws on my longitudinal empirical research exploring mainstream religious belief and identity in Euro-American countries. Starting from a qualitative study based in northern England, and then broadening the data to include Europe and North America, I argue that many ‘believe in belonging”, sometimes choosing religious identifications to complement other social and emotional experiences of ‘belongings’ and sometimes choosing secular identities. Between the sacred and the secular is ‘belief’, acting performatively like a hinge to allow different identities to swing into the foreground or recede. To understand how belief might operate in this manner requires an analytical exercise that moves belief from a narrow propositional or doctrinal meaning to one that embraces emotion, action and relationships. To ‘believe’ in this sense is to hold dear and close the people, places, ideas and values that give people their orientation to an otherwise chaotic universe. Much contemporary rich research into religion reveals such orientations and informs this chapter as we move beyond binary definitions of secular and sacred. In this chapter I will argue that what is often dismissed as merely marginal or ‘nominalist” religion is far from an empty category, but one loaded with significance and meaning: not all of it benign. Christian nominalism is arguably the largest and fastest-growing form of Christianity in Euro-American countries (Brierley 1999). My assertions here will contradict much established disciplinary theory in both the European and North American schools of the sociology of religion that assert that most people are ‘unchurched’ while privately maintaining beliefs in God and other ‘spiritual’ phenomena. Those approaches are sustained by certain assumptions about belief that remain strikingly unexplored. I draw on my longitudinal data to explore forms of what | have termed ‘ethnic’ and ‘natal’ nominalism and show, through a multi-dimensional model, how those identities arise performatively. A detailed example of the sensuous social supernatural helps provide a deeper insight into identities that are neither wholly sacred nor secular. I conclude that describing people more in terms of their anthropocentric or theocentric orientations provides more accurate insights into the social identities that lie between the secular and the sacred.62 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular The implications are both theoretical and practical. Findings discussed here help explain apparent anomalies where, for example, three-quarters of the UK population selected ‘Christian’ as their religious identity on the national census, yet fewer than 3 per cent attend church regularly and participation in other Christian rites such as baptism, confirmation, weddings and funerals is declining Mineis the only study to scrutinize qualitatively the results of the 2001 UK census and in this chapter I broaden the implications for other industrialized countries with similar apparent contradictions between religious belief and practice. In 2007 I was appointed to the Office for National Statistics Academic Advisory Board to advise the government on the wording and implications of religion and ethnicity questions for the 2011 census. Based on my fieldwork which revealed a close association between ethnicity and religion I advised the ONS to move the religion question some distance from the ethnicity question on the form. I also advised them to change the option of ‘none’ to “no religion’ to reflect a more positive choice, Both recommendations were accepted. The 2011 census revealed a significant drop in the number of Christians and increase in the number of those with no religion, Method The research described here occurred in two phases in the same location and amongst the same informants, spanning a seven-year period, The first phase began in 2002 with AHRC-funded doctoral work at Lancaster University. During 2003 and 2004 I interviewed 68 people aged 14-83 living in towns and villages in northern England, and through participant observation in schools studied a further 100. The project was initiated partly in response to what appeared to me as puzzling: the results of the 2001 UK decennial census of population revealed that 72 per cent self-identified as Christian — in a country where all forms of public Christian religious participation have been declining for at least the last 50 years, notwithstanding considerable regional and denominational variations My challenge was to probe beliefs amongst a broad cross-section of informants without skewing selection processes or questions towards religiosity. I therefore constructed questions without using overtly religious vocabulary and concepts. and avoided recruiting people who might self-select because of their religiosity. At the time. I was particularly struck by a prevailing tendency within the sociology of religion to stretch the definition of religion to include a wide-variety of phenomena, much of which I would describe as *human’. Scholars often defined extraordinary experiences as religious or spiritual, re-naming them as, folk, common, invisible or implicit (see, for example, Bailey 1990; Davie 1994; Luckmann 1967). The second phase of research was funded by the ESRC and occurred from 2009 to 2011 when I returned to the field and revisited most of my original informants in both formal, interview-based, and informal, participant-observation settings. Changes in religiosity and wider beliefs were analysed and compared, particularlyEuro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians: Believing in Belonging 63 among those experiencing rapid life transitions (for example, as youth grew from adolescence to adulthood). My main finding has been the relative stability of belief over time, with changes once again fuelled by relationships Through the empirical research I created and refined an analytical framework to provide a holistic and organic model of interpretation. This was done to allow belief to be understood multi-dimensionally and within specific contexts, incorporating considerations of content, source, practice, salience, function, time and place. Most sociological work concentrates simply on the content of belief, asking questions about whether people, for example, believe in God without knowing what the respondent may mean by belief or by God. Such types of belief are termed to be ‘propositional’ beliefs when they refer to a claim about a possible fact, or truth. This is the kind of belief measured by social scientists asking questions such as ‘Do you believe in God/heaven/hell?” etc. Many scholars have disputed this line of questioning as it presumes agreement on the content and salience of key terms. One of the classic examples of such misalignment was the research carried out by Abercrombie et al. (1970, 106) who tried to qualify the standard question by asking if respondents believed in a God who could change the events on earth. One person replied: “No, just the ordinary one.” I will begin here with where it all began: the problem of belief. Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries: Problems of Belief Although issues of belief are central to discussions within sociology and anthropology, its meaning both theoretically and empirically often remains obscured by implicit disciplinary assumptions. And yet, ‘belief’ is the unexplored territory on which battles over claims to sacred and secular identities are fought Where scholars locate and understand belief is an epistemological choice, a reflection of how we produce knowledge about those we study and about our discipline. Although that production may be invisible, it exists nonetheless and influences our interpretations and therefore our understanding about belief, From Emile Durkheim we can clearly trace two main developments that diverged by disciplinary focus: most of early-to-mid twentieth-century. social anthropology of religion adopted a Durkheimian turn where religion was explained in functional. rather than substantive terms, shaped by boundaries of time and space. Belief was thus whatever worked best at the time for the specific collective. Durkheim’s well-known definition of religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things’ takes propositional belief as a starting point but moves it into the realm of performance, ‘that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practice which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them’ (1976, 47). Beliefs were unrelated to supernatural beings but created through collective, intellectual effort classifying that which was sacred and profane so that people could practise socially cohesive64 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular behaviours. Durkheim disrupted forces of power, authority and legitimacy by relocating belief in the social and the specific. The idea that belief universally serves to explain uncanny events and give life meaning is a separate theme that arises frequently within the sociology of religion Max Weber described ‘the metaphysical needs of the human mind as it is driven to reflect on ethical and religious questions, driven not by material need but by an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position toward it’ (1922, 117). That propositional and universalizing way of looking at belief has a taken-for-granted quality. Rodney Needham (1972) argued that the broadly anthropological literature and. more specifically, ethnographic literature consistently fail to interrogate how scholars are using the term belief. Needham wentso faras to say it should be abandoned asa useful concept inresearch because it could not be universalized: “it does not constitute a natural resemblance among men, and it does not belong to the common behaviour of mankind’ (1972, 188). Needham forced a more careful interrogation about de/ief and its roots in Christianity. The concem about belief began to shift from concentrating on what other people believed to how scholars were using the concept itself. Malcolm Ruel (1982) was also concerned about how the term “belief” is used, not because of its instability as a philosophical term, but because it meant different things to different people at different times; this may not be, as I will argue, a good cnough reason to dispense with a word so prevalent in wider discourse. The tradition of troubling belief that marked anthropology was virtually absent from the sociology of religion that continued, primarily through its early theologian- sociologist Peter Berger, to leave the word undisturbed. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967) followed the Weberian tradition by assuming people universally seek meaning and stability. Davie’s ‘believing without belonging” thesis (1994) rests on a similar propositional idea of belief in suggesting that people maintain a private belief in God or other Christian-associated ideals, without church attendance or other forms of Christian participation. For a more extensive critical discussion of ‘belief see, for example, Day 2011; Lindquist and Coleman 2008; Jn 2011/12 Twas an AHRC Public Sector Placement fellow with the British Council, the UK’s largest cultural organization. The British Council is a UK-based organization, established 77 years ago as a cultural organization, It is a non-governmental organization (NGO), relying on a mix of public and private funds with a focus on cultural engagement, education and events. My role was to help develop their “Belief in Dialogue’ programme to explore whether “belief” — both religious and non-religious — was a useful term and concept in cultural relations. The Council wanted to focus on the fast-changing Arab world, and to that end I visited Cairo and Upper Egypt in January 2012 to conduct focus groups and interviews with university students and young activists. In our discussions, the young Feyptians ofien used the term “belief” to describe their values and hopes. It was not, as Thad expected, a word strictly limited to religious belief. 2 Although popularized by Davie. the term was first introduced by Gallup and Jones (1989) to describe a gap between religious belief and practice.Euro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians: Believing in Belonging 65 Robbins 2003 and for its application to wider debates about secularity in the UK context see Voas and Day 2007. To move now to a more applied context, I will look at examples of public discourse where the term ‘belief’ is rarely deconstructed because, I suggest, it relates to protecting the territory being claimed. Asad (1993) argued that ‘belief” is whatever the leaders of established religion say itis, and their saying varies according to different historical contexts that either protect or threaten the dominance of their religion. So, he argued, in the Middle Ages “belief” was not so important as skills and knowledge of, largely, monastic practice. Once the enlightenment turned to science and reason relegated much of Christian ‘knowledge’ to mere superstition, church leaders shifted the emphasis from knowledge to internal, private, and therefore relatively indiscernible ‘belief’. The propensity to privilege an undefined claim to “belief” persists today. When, for example, results from the UK 2001 decennial census showed that 72 per cent of the population ticked the “Christian” box church leaders jubilanily made a rather unseemly grab for some of the belief territory. When Rev. Barry Morgan was inaugurated as the new Archbishop of the Church in Wales on 12 July 2003, he said (Morgan 2003) that he was ‘heartened by the 200] Census results, which show most people in Wales believe in God’ The census questions for England and Wales did not ask about belief or God, only religious affiliation. In the same spirit as Morgan, ere, the Bishop of St Albans used the census finding to bolster claims to both belief and spirituality the most recent census figures would indicate that, yes, of course fewer people attend and practise their belief in specific religious buildings, but the levels of belief and spirituality in our nation are huge. To describe us as secular is simply not accurate” (Hansard 6 June 2003). The bishops’ reactions support Asad’s points that church leaders will work hard to define and redefine belief. What is at stake is more than adherence to certain creeds — whether Jesus sits on the right or left hand of God is irrelevant to most people — but belief as some sort of evidence of affiliation. That was one reason the British Humanist Association campaigned against the inclusion of a religious question on the census* and its impacts on public policy, particularly public broadcasting Its well-made point was that the census did not measure belief or, by extension, religiosity. The purpose of the census is to inform government decisions about spending money on public resources, such as education, health and welfare, but the discursive element cannot be minimized. Although my specific case deals with the UK census and the religious question, other countries have their own related problems about interpretation and impact. In the United States, for example, the purpose of the census is to gather data to apportion seats in the House of Representatives and equitably allocate money from the federal budget. This material, political aspect to the census was specifically raised in the UK by the Muslim Council of Great Britain, which issued a statement supporting the census religious question on the grounds of race discrimination 3 Tam grateful to the BHA for providing convenient access to the Hansard excerpts used in this chapter.66 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular ‘As Muslims define themselves in terms of their religion, not ethnicity, a census religious question would give government necessary information about the Muslim community. The census figures have been used to inform and justify major government decisions, not only affecting how public money is spent, but how major policies affecting a wide range of issues are debated and decided For example, a leading Christian politician used the census findings to defend discriminatory practices. This particular discursive impact was illustrated during an exchange in the House of Commons between Dr Evan Harris, then Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, and Jack Straw, then the Leader of the House, who has described himself as a Christian who regularly attends church. Harris raised the issue of religious groups carrying out publicly-funded services when some of them did not comply with human rights legislation, discriminating against certain clients (a reference, presumably, to some organizations’ refusal to accord equal rights to women and gay people). In response, Straw said there had already been a debate on the wider issue, and he had agreed that religious groups could be exempt from human rights legislation. He added that: the hon, Gentleman is a secularist, and I respect his views, but his is not the position of the vast majority of this country, 70 per cent of whom declared themselves to be Christian in the 2001 census, and there are many who subscribe to other religions. (Hansard, 25 January 2007) The census figures were also quoted in an attempt to influence public broadcasting. The Archbishops” Council of the Church of England suggested that the country’s broadcasting company, the BBC, should change its programming policy and the same point was made in the House of Lords by the Bishop of Manchester who said the census figures ‘support broadcasters who are seeking peak time for high- quality religious and spiritual content’ (Hansard, 22 May 2003). The important stakes are therefore not being fought over belief per se, but only about how belief can be used to support the real battle between secular and sacred identities. The above examples indicate the importance of the term ‘secular’ and how it has become one of the main terms being thrown like a weapon in relation to Christian belief and identity Measured against all the usual metrics of church attendance, participation in rituals and membership. mainstream Christianity is in steep decline in the UK. Europe and other Euro-American countries. That point is inarguable and therefore the census results may first appear contradictory rather than. as I suggest now, confirmatory of the ‘secularization thesis’.* On closer examination, the numbers indicate that Christianity is in rapid and overwhelming decline in the UK. Most people who ticked the ‘Christian’ box were more than 50 years old: the census figures confirmed that young people are less likely to claim a religious affiliation 4 For the ‘secularization thesis’ I refer to Wilson’s argument that religion has lost social significance due to differentiation.Euro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians: Believing in Belonging 67 than older people. A similar pattern exists in other Euro-American countries: in Canada, for example, the decline in mainstream Christianity is occurring because members of the mainstream denominations are ageing and fewer young people are identifying with them. The American Religious Identification Survey 2008revealed that 22 per cent of Americans aged 18—29 years self-identify as ‘Nones’. De Graaf’ and Grotenhuis (2008, 595-6) concluded from their study in the Netherlands, with comparisons to the UK, that religious belief will continue to decline due to cohort replacement. They also found that people did not become more religious as they age and therefore concluded that “in the Netherlands for the years to come, a continuing “silent secularisation revolution” in which both religious belief and religious affiliation decline is the most likely longitudinal trend and not a large- scale religious revival’. If self-identifying Christians are ageing, dying and not being replaced, then the future for mainstream Christianity is gloomy. To help understand the process of self-identification, and to help reveal my informants’ practices of self-identification, al the conclusion of each interview I asked them if they remembered what they had said on the UK 2001 decennial census in answer (o the question on religious identity. Most had forgotten, and so I reminded them, but I was often not allowed to finish reading the list of options as people interrupted me to declare ‘Christian’ or ‘Church of England’ (although Church of England was not an option). Most people over 50 said ‘Christian’, even those who had vehemently defended their non-religious identities in our interviews and were either agnostics or atheists. What mattered to them was not a “sacred” identity, unless the ‘sacred’ reflected a social identity, One of my informants, for example, Chris, was a man in his early 40s who insisted at several points in our interview that he was an atheist. He disliked church of any kind, describing the Catholic Church as ‘illegal’ and saying that he refuses to pray or even sing hymns when attending church weddings or funerals. When I asked him what he had said on the census he appeared to panic a little and explained that was a difficult question I replied that I didn’t know what was so difficult about it, given his continuous and often angry assertions during our interview that he was an atheist. But, he answered, ‘I may be very close to being a Christian. I’d help anybody out, things like that’. The conflation of ‘good/Christian’ may reflect his Catholic upbringing and the importance he accords to his social, perhaps sacred, identity of being a good friend and citizen. It might also reflect a racialized identity made evident by comments referring to levels of immigration being too high. particularly amongst Pakistanis. The self-identified Christianity of my informants was thus almost wholly related to their social identities. Rather than dismiss this relationship as marginal or insignificant, during the first phase (2002-2006) of what became a longer-term 10-year study I identified three, sometimes overlapping, ideal types of nominalist identities: ethnic, natal and aspirational. During follow-up work in 2009-2011 I revisited the original sites and many of my original informants and found that their religious identities had remained stable.68 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular Nuancing Nominalism I am working here with two broad, different categories: nominalists and faithful Nominalist Christians are not merely unchurched nor are they indifferent to Christianity. Instead, Christianity functions in their lives to reinforce familial, ethnic and social connections, The other main category I identify are the Christian faithful whose faith appears to be integrated in their lives in an active, engaged, emotional and intellectual experience. My research method and interview questions were designed to probe several interdependent themes, namely what informants say they believe in, what moral frameworks guide them and where they are sourced; what is most important to them in their lives, and how they understand personal agency. During most interviews, people discussed their human relationships as most important to them in informing their beliefs and morality and stressed responsibility for personal destiny. This shows an orientation towards adherent relationships, which are affective and reciprocal in nature. Further, during many interviews with people who express beliefs in adherent relationships there arose open rejection and sometimes condemnation of organized religion, the church and God. It did not perplex me, therefore, when I asked some people how they would have answered the 2001 census question about religion and they said ‘none’ or ‘other’. I would have predicted this through much of the way they answered my other questions. What did surprise me was when, at the end of the interview, I asked informants how they had answered the 2001 census question about religion and so many of those people just described as anti-religion and godless said, without hesitation, ‘Christian’. Significantly. the majority of people I interviewed who self-designated as Christian were people who had disassociated themselves from religion or God during the interview. They were not merely unchurched nor did they describe themselves as spiritual but appeared to be what I will later describe in more detail below as ‘anthropocentric’. Ethnic and natal identities are social identities relating to a claim for being Christian because of one’s perception of ‘culture’ or birth. People who otherwise self-identify as non- religious may choose the Christian box on the census because they feel forced to make a choice and want to assert their cultural or family identity in opposition to an ‘other’. The impact of that kind of ‘cultural Christianity” is not always benign as it is frequently transmitted from an older generation to a younger. When I talked with secondary school Religious Studies teachers. for example. they often noted the high level of tolerance amongst their students to other faiths — apart from when they were being influenced from their parents. One RS teacher said that in all his years of teaching, it was only Christians, both nominalist and Christian, who withdrew their children from RS classes on the grounds that they did not want them exposed to other religions. Parents said things like: “you know there’s not enough Christianity in the curriculum, they’re trying to teach our children all about Islam” [...] I guess I was a bit disappointed but I wasn’t prepared to show any emotion because I understand she was a BNPEuro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians: Believing in Belonging 69 supporter and I think she would’ve quite enjoyed the faet that, you know, the teachers at the school were persecuting her and her son for exercising their rights [...]and oh, it’s just come to mind, its, there was a boy who was withdrawn from religious education on the grounds that his parents only wanted him to be taught the Bible, not other religions, or other groups within Christianity. Aspirational nominalist identities arise from an impulse to identify with a normative Christian moral good — it being a taken-for-granted idea that, as Chris above suggested, helping someone is being Christian. Those social identities fit somewhere between what may be seen as secular (non-adherence to religious rites or doctrines) and sacred (a designated religion). The picture becomes more complicated if we prise the sacred from the religious and allow it a different status of something which we believe is so special that it cannot be transgressed or defiled. When [ asked my informants what they believed in, the non-religious answers often matched this idea of something that was, for them, an ultimate truth: ‘love’, ‘family’, ‘fairness’ and ‘kindness’ were typical responses, for example. Grasping the sacred quality of their identities was, I suggest, made possible by my method that avoided direct religious questions, probed “belief” rather than religion, and allowed informants to discuss their answers at length. I termed their responses as ‘belief narratives” to capture the socially embedded. polyvocal narrative quality In this way, belief acted rather like a hinge: depending on the social context, the belief being expressed may swing towards the normative religious or secular. I will take as an example Rosemarie, a professional in her fifties whom I interviewed twice over a span of six years. Like most of my informants, her religious identity had remained stable during this period despite several significant social changes, such as divorce, changing home and seeing her children off to university. One of the most emotionally-charged events in the intervening period between our interviews was the sudden, accidental death of her young niece. She mentioned during our conversation that the week after the young woman died Rosemarie went to church for the first time in years, attending her parent’s regular church in the village where they live Somehow, I feel closer to my parents, as a result. [ actually went, first time, I went down at Easter, I went to the church at Easter service, went t-to church service at Easter, and I did feel a kind of warmth, a kind of connection, not that I'm religious at all, but I do feel that there is a need or a, for something at this time. Something a bit, more. than just this life to grab hold of when someone very, very special dies. Left only with that fact, I might have been tempted to draw on Davie'’s (2007) theories of vicarious religion, where people are said to be drawn to the Church in times of crisis or to expect the Church to do the work of religion for them. Upon further analysis, however, it did not seem this would explain Rosemarie’s action; it was being with her family that day that was important she said, and being in70 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular the church when her niece’s name was spoken in remembrance. Her belief in the importance of family relationships and support was like the hinge which allowed her to move from the ‘secular’ to the ‘sacred’. The death did not change her beliefs or her attitude towards God or religion, which remained negative, but the church experience gave her a socially induced feeling of warmth and peace. Rosemarie’s church experience was wholly different from another of my informants, Clare, who | first interviewed when she was 15 and, she informed me then, a practising Christian. When we met again for an interview five years later she was still a practising Christian at university, and found her experiences at church religiously, but not socially, significant. Church was a place she could go to experience spirituality, she said, instead of just thinking about it. When she thought about belief, she could appreciate its moral and cultural nature, but the thinking process interfered with her pleasure in feeling it. The above examples may illustrate the significant finding that it is not church- going behaviour that distinguishes nominalisis from the faithful, but the extent to which they believe in the religious, as opposed to social, sacred. I will now turn to a more extensive discussion of the nature of what I have termed the sensuous, social, sacred supernatural The Sensuous Social Sacred Supernatural The reported experience of seeing ghosts led E.B. Tylor to develop theories of people’s belief in animism, the belief that everything, material and non-material, has a soul. He concluded that all such beliefs were infantile and products of an uncivilized society and therefore might now be surprised to find the continuing presence of animist beliefs within highly developed, industrialized, ‘modern’ contemporary societies, sometimes grouped under larger rubrics of New Age, Pagan, and Neo-Pagan. Nonetheless, Tylor’s classic definition of religion as founded on ‘a belief in spirits’ (1958 [1871]) remains prevalent in many fields today As Lambeck (2002, 21) noted: Tylor’s theories ‘remain congenial to many contemporary thinkers and [are] indeed almost a part of western “common sense” on the subject’ despite, I will add, good evidence to the contrary. For example, Hardy (1979) and Hay (1982) collected stories about people’s experiences in response to the question: ‘Have you ever been aware of a presence or a power which is different from your everyday self?” Most people did not describe such experiences as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’, as Hay (1982, 152) explained: other than the named experience of God, experiences such as ‘premonitions, encounters with the dead and encounters with an evil presence were often ruled out of the category religious’, Despite this striking finding, he concludes (162-3): ‘For reasons of shorthand I intend to continue to use the word ‘religious’ while recognizing that this is only one way of looking at it.” I suggest that by imposing the researcher’s preconceived category onto informants, this ‘shorthand’ obscures the meaning of those beliefs to people who reported such experiences.Euro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians: Believing in Belonging 1 Other researchers, particularly anthropologists, have tried not to make that mistake. For example, A. Irving Hallowell’s (1960) fieldwork on the Ojibwa, an indigenous North American people, showed that that their lives and understanding centred on relationships with persons, both human and other-than-human. Nurit Bird-David (1999) studied the Nayaka people of Southern India in the 1970s and 80s and found simular beliefs about relationships, which she described as a sense of fellowship created through spending time in relationship with an entity, be that a person or a tree, Harvey (2005) reviews those and related theories and confirms the theme of continuing relationships with humans and those other-than- human. Given such a proliferation of studies demonstrating the nearly ubiquitous phenomenon of continued relationships with human and non-human entities, it is surprising that people persist in calling all those relationships religious, or spiritual, when in many cases they may simply be everyday ‘human’ practice For my informants there was no struggle or concern about slippage of terms to describe what was, to them, everyday. Transcendence was shifted to an everyday, human, social scale, relocating a transcendent “other y experience of the ever-after. As Wood (2004) observed, the so-called ‘spiritual’ experiences that sometimes may appear to be fluid and free-floating, such as certain forms of “new age’ spirituality, are in practice often deeply rooted in social and particularly kinship networks Although I deliberately did not ask people if they were religious, or spiritual, orhad experienced supra human phenomena, one-third of my informants reported feeling, or occasionally seeing, a presence of something outside themselves. These presences were usually, as Patrick deseribed above, deceased loved ones. I style these accounts ‘sensuous’ to note their physical, tangible nature as the experiences mainly seemed to be emotional and embodied. My informants usually described physical sensations such as smell, sound, and sight and affective, bodily responses such as calm or, rarely, fear. Further, I describe the sensuous experiences as “social” because they were mainly relational and usually shared with others who had either experienced the same direct experience with them or at least helped interpret the event as it was retold or performed For example, I first interviewed Gemma when she was 14 and described herself as not religious. When T interviewed her again six years later, she said she was still not religious, but she thought there was something that happened to people after they died. Her belief stemmed from a specific experience when she thought she had seen a ghost. When she told her friends they refused to believe her. However. she stated that “my nana believed me’. After that experience, she learned to laugh and joke with her friends about it, but never disbelieved it. I suggest it was not only the memory of the experience that lingered, but also the belief of her grandmother and how she supported Gemma’s account. Another informant, Becca, 28, who was adamantly anti-religious and anti-God, described experiences sensing her deceased grandmother, and her deceased brother. Both senses were strongly related to smell, with her grandmother’s presence associated with the smell of violets, her favourite flower, and her brother’s with the smell of his aftershave. In both cases72 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular her emotional response was similar with the feeling that they were looking after her. And yet, it did not seem to be solely the sensuous experiences which provided her with a feeling that her relatives lingered, but rather the mediation of her mother inthe explanation. For example, she told me about a number of instances when she believed that thunderstorms brought her warnings and messages about her brother, using the pronoun ‘we’ to refer to how she and her mother together interpreted the experience. Her emotional, sensed, shared experience was not just individually felt but socially shared and validated. This, although a different context, reflects what Orsi (2012, 148) described as the “corporalization of the sacred’, itself being spread to others through contagious effect: I mean by this the practice of rendering the invisible visible by constituting it as an experience in a body ~ in one’s own body or in someone else’s body — so the experiencing body itself becomes the bearer of presence for oneself and for others. Orsi points out that the materialization or the concrete experience of something considered to be sacred has long been part of Catholic practice through the devotional experience of touching the relic, or body part, of a saint. This is a way of, he suggests, rendering the invisible visible and present. I suggest that it may not only be saints but deceased relatives whose presences are rendered present, while remaining invisible, and felt through the body. It is also, I suggest, performative. The idea that belief has a performative function is not new: it draws on Durkheimian theories that belief is produced through the ecstasy of human ritual action. This variety of belief is not pre-formed, but performed. If beliefs are performative, as I will suggest, they cannot also be timeless or universal. They must be brought into being in specific contexts, times and places. Mary Douglas drew on Durkheim, and rejected Tylor, by showing that beliefs satisfy a social concern where ‘the metaphysic is a by-product, as it were, of the urgent practical concern’ (1966, 113). This means that no belief is static or universal, but must respond, collectively, to changing circumstances. Belief arises not as a philosophy or creed, but as a collective. pragmatic means for the ‘believer’ (returning to a Weberian theme) to impose order and achieve a sense of coherence. Propositional belief was therefore not so important as the role belief performed in the individual and the culture. All beliefs, for Douglas. were about the varieties of powers and dangers that a society recognizes and have as their main function to impose system “on an inherently untidy experience’ (5), Drawing on those theories of performativity, I do not rely on “performance” as suggested by, for example, Goffman (1959, 15) as: ‘the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants’ — but begin rather with Austin’s (1962) observation that some linguistic performances are performative in creating a changed state. Butler (1990) argued that such performative acts were intense and repeated and Bourdieu (1991) provided an important addition: social realities are not created through AustinianEuro-American Ethnic and Natal Christians: Believing in Belonging 3 linguistic utterances alone, but through the symbolic and structural power already present, if unacknowledged, within specific social relations, in ‘the field” Anthropocentrics and Theocentrics The above examples of nominalist self-identification and non-religious other- than-human relationality are difficult to explain using conventional language of only the sacred and secular. I have suggested that belief can be the hinge that allows people’s orientations to move between the two. What is being experienced in these cases is not a strict division between religious or secular, but rather an orientation to a more human or, alternatively, a more theistic view of where power and authority are situated. What became quickly obvious after the first few interviews in my longitudinal study, and maintained throughout, is that most people believe in their relationships with other people. Those I interviewed did not generalize about “people” but were specific about the sorts of people who were important to them: these people are those with whom they have adherent, affective reciprocal relationships, most commonly partners, family and friends. With those people, they believe it is important to act morally, which for the most part meant treating people as they would like to be treated. From those people, they trace their moral heritage and consider the roots and the formation of their beliefs to be a result of those personal relationships and the experiences they have had with those relationships. The majority of people I interviewed rarely talked about God or other divine beings. They generally think the universe was created by a ‘big bang’ to be explained one day by ‘science’, believe that when they die they do not go to another place such as heaven, and if they are asked a forced question about religion and answer ‘Christian’ they do so, because of family or “ethnic” reasons. While I was tempted to describe those people as ‘humanists’ to reflect the primacy of their beliefs in human beings, and to add to an existing body of knowledge that such people are ‘secular’ in their scientific and rational beliefs, they have slightly confounded those bounded categories by their enduring beliefs in spirits. T have explored, how many of these believe that their dead relatives watch over them, talk to them, guide them, and sometimes protect them. Some believe that such influence covers them with a protective canopy under which all is well. preordained. and meant to be. For the most part. they are reluctant to call that influence ‘God’: some who believe in the etemal influence of their relatives are affirmed atheists. Their orientation was to people, not to gods, and thus anthropocentric seems to convey best the idea that human beings are ‘centric’ to their lives and it is with them they locate power and authority. A minority of people were markedly different when they discussed the content of their beliefs. This minority responded either immediately or very soon into the interview that they believed in God. They also tended to say at different times in the interview that their most important relationship was with God, indicating that their God-belief was highly salient. The way they described their moral beliefs was often spoken74 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular in reference to what God would want. This theocentric type of discourse never occurred with the anthropocentrics. This minority also described their relationship with God as the overarching canopy, protecting them and giving them meaning in their lives; one day they would be united with him in heaven. They tend not to have contact with the spirits of their dead relatives. They, like the anthropocentrics, had strong human relationships but they did not describe those relationships as the centre of their beliefs and therefore | have described them as ‘theocentric’. It is their orientation, rather than their practice, that I am identifying here. Conclusion In summary, anthropocentrics articulate their beliefs primarily in reference to their human relationships. Unless coaxed into seeing belief in non-religious terms, they may say that they believe in ‘nothing’, as if they do not regard their human-centred beliefs in the same category as religious beliefs. Theocentrics cite God and their relationship to him as central to their lives. Describing people more in terms of their anthropocentric or theocentric orientations provides more accurate insights into the social identities that lie between the secular and the sacred. Belief in ‘the social’ in this context is an expression of emotion and relatedness through belonging and longing, which may often arise in a tendency to draw clear boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘others’. The nature of belief narratives, with their open-endedness and continuation, demanded a multi-dimensional method of analysis which revealed different orientations towards the human or divine. Conceptually, religion and secularization thus become sub-sets of ‘belief? Acknowledgments Some sections of this chapter draw on and update Day (2010) and Day (2011)Chapter 5 Multiple versus Unitary Belonging: How Nepalis in Britain Deal with ‘Religion’ David N. Gellner and Sondra L. Hausner Introduction The rise of identity politics generates a tension between those who want to make particular identities the central and determining aspect of their social being and people who do not wish to do so or who refrain from doing so.' The latter group, arguably the majority, mobilize such identifications either only strategically (or tactically) or not at all? Formal identities, once accepted by the state, provide the basis for the politically implicated process of regular counting, i.e. censuses, and (eventually) the distribution of resources. Such identities are, therefore, the focus of much detailed attention from sociologists and other social scientists. This focus in the academic study of religion (or ethnicity) can easily give rise to a well- known fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the fact that a category can be counted is wrongly taken to mean that a self-conscious group exists.> Reality, however, rarely corresponds perfectly to academic theory and indeed often confounds expectations: for example, for many Nepalis with whom we have worked, the y depend on context, Furthermore, since the mobilization of categories is a process with religious category into which they fall is by no means obvious and m status and political implications, in many cases there is a rather large gap between what people actually do in the privacy of their own shrine room and their declared identities when responding to census-takers or when participating in public meetings. Reflecting on this gap, we have argued elsewhere that a fundamental ! We thank the AHRC and ESRC for the funding which made possible the Religion and Society programme directed by Linda Woodhead (www.religionandsociety.org): this chapter is based on research carried out as part of a project ( Vernacular Religion: Varieties of Religiosity in the Nepali Diaspora) sponsored by that programme. We thank also Bal Gopal Shrestha and the members of the Centre for Nepal Studies UK (CNSUK) who assisted in the collection of data for the Vernacular Religion (VR) project: Krishna Adhikari, Chandra Laksamba, and Rajubabu Shrestha ? On strategy and tactics in rel at the Sacred Practices of Everyday Life conference: http://www.religionandsociety.org. uk events/programme _events/show/sacred practices of everyday life 3 For an attack on this fallacy in the study of ethnicity, see Brubaker (2004), ious practice, see Linda Woodhead’s keynote speech76 Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular distinction is required for any adequate understanding of religious phenomena, namely that between category (census label) and practice (what people actually do) (Hausner and Gellner 2012). South Asian data bring out very clearly how very fluid religious categories are and how fallacious it can be to assume that they correspond to distinct, homogeneous, and mutually exclusive social groups. Other scholars have independently and in different (mainly Christian/Westem) contexts come to rather similar conclusions. Mark Chaves, for example, castigates what he calls the ‘religious congruence fallacy’: “attitudes and behavior correlate only weakly, and collections of apparently related ideas and practices rarely cohere into logically unified, mutually reinforcing, seamless webs ... This is true of culture in general, and it is true of religious culture in particular’ (Chaves 2010, 2) This incongruence is manifold and can appear (i) among belief’, (ii) between beliefs and actions, and (iii) between different contexis, such incongruity is, within the social science of religion, “an established uncontroversial fact’ (Chaves 2010, 5). Yet, both in society in general and in the sociology and anthropology of religion in particular, it is a truism that we all too often forget. People are surprised at ‘non-congruent’ behaviour, when in fact it is the attainment of “congruence” that is unusual and in need of explanation. Chaves allows that congruence is occasionally achieved, but argues that the default presumption in the study of religion ought rather to be that it is unlikely to obtain: the onus should be on the observer of religion who claims to have found congruence (believers who are entirely consistent in their beliefs and between their beliefs and their actions) to prove that it is there, not the other way around. Starting from an empirical study of ordinary ‘mainstream’ people in Yorkshire, Abby Day (2011) likewise found a gap between formal census categories and what people actually believed or did. She notes a moment of epiphany in her research when a 14-year-old boy asserted, quite emphatically, that he believed in nothing and was a Christian (Day 2011, 29). That her research was carried out in Yorkshire, where there are towns like Bradford with prominent Muslim minorities, is no doubt relevant here. Her explorations of religious belief, which avoided direct questioning about religious affiliation, revealed that it was far too simple to see people as either Christian or not, as either religious or secular. What she found was a largely performative anthropocentrism that mostly rejected conventional religion and religious categories. and yet had plenty of space for belief in ghosts In the vernacular practice of most people in South Asia. such varied belief and practice according to context is very much the norm, and arguably always has been. Michael Carrithers (2000) has coined the term ‘polytropic’ for this situation.‘ In South Asia it is taken for granted that the world contains numerous spiritual powers and that ordinary people should respect and propitiate them, without conceming themselves about the particular religious traditions or labels (categories) applied to them. Deities belong to more than one religious tradition, or are thought to be incarnations of each other (Gellner 1992. 74-80). Polytropy is 4 See Gellner (2005) for its applications to Nepali religious history.Multiple versus Unitary Belonging 77 not quite the same thing as ecumenicism, in that the former refers to an attitude that simply ignores the differences between religious traditions or teachings, whereas the latter acknowledges different and separate traditions and seeks a unity behind or between them. If ecumenicism looks to an equality of religious traditions or religious categories, polytropy is simply uninterested in the question of category. In practice, these two stances ~ though analytically distinguishable — often blur or blend in to one another. ‘The phenomenon of multiple religious belonging, if we may call it that, is so widespread in Indic religions — multiplicity in paths, teachings, teachers, healers, local practices and traditions — that ultimately the problem is less to explain how something Westemers view as singular became or becomes multiple, but, on the contrary, via what route we might have arrived at expressions of singularity. The very practice of placing oneself in a single religious category was not something ordinary South Asians were expected to do until the British started to carry out censuses. Or rather, it was something that was characteristic only of religious virtuosi and those who imitated them. Most lay people would not have dreamt of doing so. It is probably a social universal for religious specialists to regard the practice of lay people as imperfect, if not downright impure; in the South Asian context it was equally normal for lay people themselves to be ignorant of or to disregard such views, even if they deeply respected those very virtuosi and sought their blessings and instrumental assistance. Inshort, multiple belonging isa frequent and attested position for South Asians. It is no longer a majority position — the modemist assumption of singularity has by now taken deep root — but, as we hope to demonstrate, multiple belonging remains a viable mode of identification in the Nepali cultural world. Changing Religious Categories in Nepal and in the Diaspora In Nepal the practice of classifying people into discrete religious boxes started only in the 1950s, when people — or at the least the census-enumerators — had to be taught how to apply the categories. “What is your religion?’ was not then a meaningful question to many people: by contrast, ‘what is your caste?” was unavoidable. and in most contexts permitted only one exclusive answer. Prior to 1951 people needed to know what jat (caste or ethnic group) they belonged to (Muslim? was treated as a kind of jat): this knowledge was essential for all kinds of rights and duties, as well as for everyday interactions, not to mention marriage. Thus one’s caste was the first and most important sociological fact any Nepali needed to know about any other whom they encountered (and is arguably still so today, even though the consequences that follow from it are vastly attenuated when compared to a century ago). Until it was replaced in 1963, the law code of the country differentiated punishments and rights according to one’s caste (Hofer 2004 [1979]. By contrast, although people practised religion, and although some of them were certainly aware, for example, that their tradition was Buddhist and