Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in The Modern World

Day, A. (2011). Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in The Modern World.  Oxford: Oxford University Press

This fascinating monograph explores the nature of believing in modern Euro-American societies.  It is based on the author’s post-doctoral research at Lancaster University and builds on her PhD thesis, a case study centred on the Yorkshire town of Skipton.

Day set herself the challenge of exploring belief by asking open questions that did not presuppose that answers would be offered in relation to religious categories.  So, for example, What do you believe in? and, What or who is most important to you in your life?  She then compared her findings with related studies from around the world.  The research is well designed and the results significant.

The main finding is summed up in the title: people believe in belonging.  To say they believe is to engage in identity building by claiming belonging – to Christianity (even if they don’t believe in God) to family (on condition that they get to decide who qualifies as family) and to friends (with whom they work out their problems and their opinions).

Unsurprisingly then Day suggests that Grace Davie’s influential argument that people in Britain today believe but don’t like to belong misses the mark.  People may not choose to participate in the activities of organised, institutional religion but this does not mean that belonging is unimportant.  On the contrary, for most people believing is profoundly relational.  People believe because they belong and in order to reinforce belonging.

This believing in belonging is found to apply to those (the great majority) for whom believing is anthropocentric, that is those who articulate their beliefs primarily in reference to their human relationships.  It also applies to those for whom believing is theocentric in that they cite God and their relationship with God as central to their lives.  This observation leads to an interesting and nuanced exploration of the phenomenon of Christian nominalism.

Day offers us a rich picture of what it is to believe and in the light of her research suggests that we consider seven dimensions of the phenomenon: content, what people believe; sources, where beliefs originate; practice, whether and how belief informs behavior; salience, the importance people attribute to their beliefs; function, the role of beliefs in people’s lives; place the relationship between belief and location whether public or private, geographic or social and time, the fluidity or fixity of beliefs in relation to passing time and specific times.  As an interpretive framework this scheme would seem to have real potential.

Much more could be said about what this book has to offer; there is a Foucault inspired archeology of the concept of belief in the fields of  sociology and anthropology; there are interesting observations on the way people limit moral obligations to those to whom they belong and the significance for many of ongoing relationships with the dead; there’s an investigation of young people and belief, of believing in fate and of the “othering” of women, non-Christian religions and “Asians” as those responsible for moral decline.  All this in two hundred pages.

I have long thought that missiologists don’t pay nearly enough careful attention to the work of sociologists of religion – Duncan McLaren’s Mission Implausible was a notable exception, now sadly out of print.  Abby Day writes as an academic sociologist and an active researcher.  Her findings are a helpful contribution to the sociology of secularisation; they open an intriguing window into believing in Britain today.  Believing in Belonging makes instructive reading, to say the least for those us concerned that our compatriots might come to belong to the company of those who believe in Jesus.

This review was originally written for Regent's Reviews and is reproduced here with permission of the editor.  Check out the web site to get a free pdf of a whole bunch of reviews. 

Mission Implausible - Book Review

I've decided to stick a few book reviews up on the blog.  Some of them were written a while ago.  This one relates to a book that is now sadly out of print.  Shame.  It's a good 'un.  Still might be possible to pick one up second hand.  Anyhow, here's the review.

Duncan MacLaren, Mission Implausible: Restoring Credibility to the Church (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2004)

The latest edition of Religious Trends from Peter Brierley’s organisation, Christian Research, catalogues the ongoing, dismal decline of the UK church.  Brierley predicts that if current trends continue 1.3 million (net) members will leave between the years 2000 and 2020, a loss of 23%.  This is the context for Duncan MacLaren’s very helpful contribution to the growing literature on mission in western societies.   Specifically he offers insights from The Sociology of Knowledge a field pioneered in the 60’s and 70’s by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman.  His hope is to discover strategies that the church might adopt to recover credibility for itself and its message.

MacLaren is sympathetic to Grace Davie’s contention that the dramatic decline of the fortunes of Christianity in Europe is something of an oddity when compared to the remarkable resilience of religion elsewhere.  In accounting for this decline  he allows for influences arising from the history of ideas since the enlightenment.  However, more weight is given to sociological factors.  Here MacLaren lines up with classic secularisation theorists such as Bryan Wilson and Steve Bruce, attributing the decline of the church to the inhospitality of modernity (at least in its European form) towards institutional Christianity.  His analysis of the impact of such issues as urbanisation, industrialisation, and privatisation covers familiar ground with commendable clarity and lightness of touch.  Similarly we are offered a very useful introduction to Berger’s notion of plausibility structures – those aspects of any given society that bolster the credibility of  certain beliefs. 

Next, Maclaren identifies various forms of religion that seem to buck the secularisation trend.  For instance sectarian forms of religion such as Pentecostalism or the latent religion associated with high profile tragedies such as the death Diana.  He then goes on to suggest various reasons for such resilience.  This thinking is cashed out in terms of five “imperatives for practical action for restoring credibility to the church”.  Very stimulating stuff this.

With echoes of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture we then get MacLaren’s consideration of the positioning of the church viz a viz the rest of society.  He identifies three promising strategies: tension (the sectarian option which maximises internal coherence and maintains distinctives); momentum (making the most of favourable societal trends by going with the flow) and the middle way of significance (engaging in public issues in ways that maximise the visibility of the church).  The suggestion is that a missionary-minded church needs to find ways of simultaneously becoming distinctive, inculturated and engaged.  Interesting, but I wasn’t entirely convinced by the suggestion that the Columban mission of the Celtic church is an example of how this might be achieved.

All in all I found Mission Implausible a very helpful and worthwhile read; so much so that I now use it as one of the core text-books for my course on Mission In Contemporary Britain.  Its value lies in the combination of sociology and missiology.  While there is little here that is brand new, MacLaren is a well-informed and reliable guide to both fields and his handling of the conversation between the two is very stimulating.

Is God Still an Englishman?

The long train journey to and from Plymouth gave me time to read Cole Moreton's Is God Still an Englishman? How We Lost Our Faith (But Found New Soul)   

Moreton, a former Charismatic, former Alternative Worship type and now former Christian weaves together cultural commentary, autobiography and the occasional thread of sociology as he examines transformations in England, Englishness and in particular the religion, faith and spirituality of the English.  He does it in a highly readable way too.  Moreton visits John Wimber and the Death of Diana, The Nine O'Clock Service and Anti War Marches, Billy Graham and Greenham Common, Morris Cerullo and Jade Goody.  I see much of my story in his, the public events that have shaped his life touched mine also.  But even if you're not a middle-aged working class boy who converted to Christianity in his teens it's still well worth the nine hours or so it takes to read.

Like me you may not be quite as sanguine as Moreton about all the aspects of the rebranding and thinning of English religiosity but the author's own destination is not the point, what counts is the scenery he points out on route.  This is a non academic but well informed and convincing journalistic portrayal of the passing of English christendom and the ebbs and flows of secularisation.  Highly recommended.

A British Future For American Christianity?

Christian commentators in the States are reflecting on the implications of the American Religious Identification Survey which indicates that secularisation is biting deep. This is an excerpt from David Gushee writing for the Associated Baptist Press.

Christians who bring faith-based moral convictions into the public square will win less and less. Some will respond by just shouting more loudly, thus turning more people away from Christ. Others will shift to a paradigm of faithful witness rather than cultural victory. Broad-based coalitions across religious and ideological lines will be a necessity.

The era in which cultural Christianity delivered bodies and dollars to churches and sustained thousands of often marginally effective Christian organizations is ending. The era in which Christians could afford to spend their time and money fighting with each other in the pews or the annual conventions or the newspapers is ending.

We will either deliver to people vital, meaningful, life-changing, Christ-following Christianity, or we will die of our own irrelevance.

Seems to me that if American church leaders want to discover what the future might hold all they have to do is visit Britain.

USA: Atheism Grows, Christianity Declines

The much vaunted resilience of religion in the USA raises significant questions about classic secularisation theory which asserts that as societies modernise they also secularise. Various modles have been put forward to explain differing patterns in North America and Western Europe. However, in recent years research findings have begun to indicate that stateside Chrstianity is not as resilient as was once thought. The latest report is the American Religious Idnetification Survey conducted in 2008.

Alan Hirsch offers the following summary:

1) Religion and Christianity are on the decline in the US;
2) Protestantism is doing worse than Catholicism due to Catholic immigrants;
3) Mormonism is keeping up with population growth, and Islam and New Age/Wicca are exceeding it;
4) Atheism, while still a small percentage of the population, is on the rise; and
5) “Spirituality,”–or non-organized belief in God–is still vibrant in the US.

For the full report go here.

The USA is not the same as Western Europe. Religion is more resilent there than here. It still poses questions for classic secularisation. But the long recognised decline in the American mainline denominations now seems to be affecting other expressions of Christianity as well.

Many in the past have taken comfort from trends across the pond looking to learn lessons for own struggles to resist decline. There is still some mileage in such an approach when applied with due care but we must not take false comfort. The first step to finding a new way forward is to look reality in the face. Whistling in the dark is no way to find an anthem to which we can march forward. It could well be that the challenge we face is even bigger than we thought.