Multiple Faiths

Definition

Given the continuous and rapid changes acting on contemporary society, an individual who has ties to multiple faiths may accordingly be broadly defined. An individual who consciously identifies with more than one faith, regardless of beliefs or practices, would be considered to have ties to multiple faiths. However, an individual also may be considered to have ties to multiple faiths if he or she draws on beliefs and/or practices from more than one faith, regardless of whether or not he or she consciously identifies with or declares ties to more than one faith. This definition includes individuals who practice, adhere to the beliefs of, or identify with more than one established denomination or subgroup of the same larger religious tradition but excludes institutionalized group practices or identities involving the syncretism of multiple faiths.

Examples

There is a wide difference in how individuals may have ties to more than one faith. In the Eastern context, Catherine Cornille, who is skeptical of contemporary Westerners’ claims to belong to more than one faith, describes how the Chinese can easily experience a sense of simultaneous belonging to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Jan Van Bragt observes that more than half of all Japanese people claim to be adherents to both Shinto and Buddhism. And Elizabeth Harris describes how 19th-century Sri Lankan Buddhists reinterpreted existing identities and expressions of religiousness to incorporate the Christianity brought to them by British evangelical missionaries.

Examples from the West are less common but still readily available. One typical respondent from Gideon Goosen's research in Greater Sydney, Australia, was a woman who considered herself Hindu but, having been influenced by the Catholic schools in which she had been educated, often attended Catholic churches to pray to Jesus and Mary and was inspired by the Ten Commandments. A particularly illustrative case from Nancy Eiesland's study of an exurb of Atlanta, Georgia, was a family that had ties to several different denominations of Christianity; the family members’ religious narratives simultaneously incorporated elements from all of these diverse ties, which included their affiliation with the local United Methodist Church, a nearby Baptist megachurch where the wife participated in a “Grief Relief” support group, the influences of [Page 841]her Catholic and Presbyterian siblings, and the husband's upbringing with little attachment to any faith.

Related Phenomena

Other, closely related phenomena have been documented in studies of the U.S. population. Robert Wuthnow found that a large minority of young adults were engaged in spiritual tinkering in two particularly common ways—“church shopping” and “church hopping.” Church shopping involves attending various religious institutions while presumably seeking one in which to settle and become a regular member. Church hopping, however, involves staying in the market or tinkering with several possible selections rather than settling down with one, which appears to Wuthnow to be intentional among those who find variety appealing. An examination of people who claim no religious preference in national surveys found that many of them still held a weak sense of attachment to a religious tradition and thus might identify with the tradition sometimes, if not always; for this group, religious identity was a situational trait rather than a stable one and could vary from one context to another.

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