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This chapter analyzes the strikingly divergent trajectories of Christian belief and practice in Scandinavia and the United States. All Scandinavian countries in the twentieth century experienced a decline in regular church attendance that appears to have been consistent throughout the century, and that may have begun as soon as religious compulsion was lifted in the nineteenth century. This protracted decline mirrored the slow waning of orthodox Christian belief, but this was not a decline from a previous golden age of faith; rather there seems every likelihood that the adherence of many Scandinavian people to Christian faith had been quite tenuous ever since the region was first evangelized. Yet the Scandinavian countries also illustrate in a pointed way the possibility that in certain conditions, stable patterns of religious belonging can exist almost independently of personal religious belief. Meanwhile, the United States in the twentieth century was by some criteria a more “secular” nation than Sweden or Denmark. The American state from its inception has refused to give any religious body privileged status before the law. In consequence, religion in the United States has always been divorced from the apparatus of government and public institutions to a much greater extent than in the Scandinavian nations, and in the course of the twentieth century, that divorce became more absolute in certain spheres, notably in the universities, public education, and the media.

This chapter examines how religious identifications structure religious beliefs and religious belonging. It first considers several important features of religious belief and belonging and how religious beliefs are influenced by identifications with religious denominations and their contours and dynamics, and whether such influences are shifting across generations. It then explores how ethnicity channels both beliefs and commitments and reshapes the contours of American religion. It also addresses the popular notion which contends that Americans are increasingly “believers who don't belong.” More specifically, it discusses the phenomenon of believing without belonging, the tendency to belong while not believing, and the growing trend of not believing and not belonging. The chapter shows that religious identities play an important role in structuring religious belonging and religious beliefs and that religious beliefs and social influences on religious participation vary substantially across ethnic groups.

This chapter explores the sur al-Lawati, the fortified enclave of the al-Lawati, a non-Arab, non-Ibadi mercantile community historically oriented toward the British Raj, staunchly allied to the pre-1970 Muscat sultanate, and grounded in a Shiʿi geography. This community has been incorporated into Oman's national historical narration and iconic imagery. Their differences to the Arab and Ibadi population are managed through the state's governing logics of a common history and tribalization, even while these institutional mechanisms apportion the space in which one emerges as an Omani citizen. This dense assemblage of key elements both limits and opens possibilities for political engagement and participation in state planning and policy making. These terms of reference formulate the space in which the “differences” that sum up the al-Lawati are managed within the community and with outsiders, defining the terms of their political and religious belonging and the referential basis by which they participate in public life (outside the sur) versus private life (inside the sur).

This chapter offers a better understanding of the relation between gender and Islam by portraying and exploring a subjective account of conciliating religiosity and modern individualism. The study is conducted based on a life story narrative of a Muslim migrant woman from Iran, living in Belgium. Her life story and experiences prior to and after migration are analysed to reveal how she has built and made sense of her religiosity in the European context. By adopting a life story method, the chapter aims to investigate dynamics of conciliating supposedly contradicting cultural and religious discourses, and to explore religious belonging and personalization of faith.

Various aggregate measures of religious belonging are presented, relative to population. The data derive from opinion polls, church sources, and estimates by Peter Brierley. They reveal the extent of religious belonging varied according to the measure used, as well as by demographic factors. Most stable was religious profession, with no major breakthrough for no religionism. Neither did sundry self-rating indicators of the personal saliency of religion exhibit obvious collapse. Church membership figures, hard to evaluate summatively on account of differing denominational criteria, showed some net decrease, but not spectacular and with partially compensating areas of growth beyond mainline Churches. Protestant Sunday schools, by contrast, already in recession before the 1960s, lost even more ground, while in the Free Churches adult adherents reduced at a faster rate than members. The overall religious community, persons in touch with faith bodies, however tenuously, was static in absolute terms but contracted relatively.

Two key features of religious belonging are investigated, saliency of religion (self-identification as a religious person) and religious affiliation. The former, evidenced in sample surveys, is explored from five angles: religiosity (binary questions), religiosity (non-binary questions), spirituality versus religiosity, importance of religion, and difference made by religion. All point towards decline. Sample surveys are also a major source for religious affiliation, but results are extremely sensitive to variant question wording. In particular, asking whether a respondent belongs to any religion (which has increasingly become the dominant form) minimizes the numbers professing some affiliation and maximizes those self-reporting as having no religion. By contrast, the official Annual Population Survey and decennial census in England and Wales simply ask ‘What is your religion?’ This presumptive terminology generates higher levels of affiliation, especially by Christians. Either way, however, there has been an exponential growth in religious nones, notably since the millennium.

Kamala Khan is often described as a Muslim superhero. But her official description mentions more than her religion: her family is​ ​from Pakistan, she is a teenager, and she is from New Jersey. She is a clearly a multi-identified individual, many facets of which put her in opposition to a conception of what it means to be American that is enshrined in the founding documents of the United States, which privilege race, class, and gender explicitly, and establish norms around religious belonging. The integration of a marginalized community to the cultural center is not unidirectional, but dialogic; both the center and the margin change. The mechanism for this change is the process of hybridity, but that process cannot be fully understood without an engagement with how the dominant society is marginalizing Khan’s various identifications, and how she is being written in response to that marginalization.

This chapter observes that many undergraduates find themselves drawn to more than one religious tradition, philosophical perspective, or lifestance. Indeed, the concept of “multiple religious belonging” may describe a very common circumstance, in which human beings find themselves drawn to, and sometimes overwhelmed by, an eclectic blend of beliefs and practices. Certain parallels may be drawn between these experiences and the broader experience of adolescent women, who find themselves pulled in many directions by the demands of contemporary culture. The chapter brings together a discussion of Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia with the example of “Sheila” in Habits of the Heart (ed. Robert Bellah et al.). Rather than assuming that experiences of multiple belonging result from confusion or indifference, the author counsels meeting these perspectives where they are, exploring how this quest for meaning might positively shape vocational reflection and discernment.

The first four sections reprise findings for religious belonging, behaving, and believing and institutional measures outlined in Chapters 2–8. The fifth attempts a balance-sheet of religious change in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. It dismisses Callum Brown’s suggestion that 1963 inaugurated a period of revolutionary secularization, arguing instead that many religious performance indicators were already in decline beforehand with others remaining stable, while acknowledging some few experienced ‘crisis’ during the long 1960s. Brown’s gendered causation is also rejected, no evidence being found that women were leaving, or not joining, the Churches in greater numbers than men; alternative explanations for decline are proposed. The final section contextualizes the long 1960s within a timeframe extending backwards to the eighteenth century and forwards to the present. Summarizing previous research by the author and others, and critiquing proponents of ‘change, not decline’, the picture is one of gradualist, not revolutionary, secularization in Britain.

The extent of religious belonging is investigated in terms of membership of particular faith communities, preferably as directly enumerated by them, supplemented by Peter Brierley’s estimates and the census of population. In scholarly debates about secularization, membership is frequently cited as a metric, yet there is ambiguity surrounding what it entails and certainly no common criteria, rendering comparisons and aggregate analysis difficult. Some communities (notably the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches and non-Christians) consider their entire constituency to be members, while mainstream Protestant denominations often have some form of membership coincidental with the transition to late adolescence or adulthood, thereby differentiating members from children and other adult worshippers. To avoid misrepresentation, data for each major denomination and faith are examined in turn. Overall, net religious membership in Britain has declined substantially during the half-century under review, notwithstanding pockets of growth (variously attributable to natural increase, immigration, or––less commonly––conversion).

The size of individual denominations and faiths is documented, from their own returns of ‘membership’ or constituency, occasionally supplemented by external estimates. There were per capita falls in Anglican communicants and electoral rolls, but the most serious decline was in confirmands. The Roman Catholic Church advanced, although the pace slowed from the early 1960s, partly as a consequence of lapsation. Orthodox Churches expanded, notably in the 1970s, principally through immigration. Among the traditional Free Churches, the Congregational and Reformed cluster and Welsh Nonconformity suffered most losses. Strong countervailing (but only partially offsetting) growth was recorded especially by Pentecostal and Holiness Churches, House Churches, and New Churches (all Trinitarian) and Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses (non-Trinitarian). Muslims overtook Jews as Britain’s largest non-Christian community, through migration, which also led to big increases in Hindus and Sikhs. Paradoxically, despite an alleged religious crisis, the societies comprising organized irreligion were a weakening force.

Chapter 4 assesses gender differences in the beliefs, practices, and ideas of community that draw women and men toward belonging. We tracked groups of individuals who were visiting or considering joining each congregation and interviewed most of them several times as they worked through the process of considering greater commitment to these congregations. We focus on three aspects of that process—the personal and religious history of prospective members, motivations for church shopping, and the substance that attracted women and men to these congregations. Gender differences in the experience of becoming a member are often less substantial or work in different directions than we might expect, given normative ideals around masculinity and femininity.