Religious Identity

Religious holidays, celebrations, community commemorations, rites of passage, foodways, artistic and musical styles, types of dress, and modes of speech are all aspects of culture that can become enmeshed within the makeup of a religious identity. Religious identity correlates to a number of social factors: age, gender, economic status, national and ethnic identities, educational background, social standing, sexual orientation, and personal identifiers. Religious identity is also molded by a set of carried beliefs: dogmatic principles, moral standings, coded mythologies, highly esteemed parables, social taboos, and understandings of God or divinity, the supernatural, and the cosmological universe. As adopted ideas transform patterns of thought, ways of identifying self become linked to external actions shaped by internal, belief-based realities: Within this meaning-making process, religious identity becomes individuated ...